en-US Mon, 14 Apr 2025 10:41:14 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 44512554 If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand?

The endlessly fascinating question of whether we are alone in the universe has always been accompanied by another, more complicated one: if there is extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? In this book, Daniel Oberhaus leads readers on a quest for extraterrestrial communication. Exploring Earthlings' various attempts to reach out to non-Earthlings over the centuries, he poses some not entirely answerable questions: If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? What languages will they (and we) speak? Is there not only a universal grammar (as Noam Chomsky has posited), but also a grammar of the universe?

Oberhaus describes, among other things, a late-nineteenth-century idea to communicate with Martians via Morse code and mirrors; the emergence in the twentieth century of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence), and finally METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence); the one-way space voyage of Ella, an artificial intelligence agent that can play cards, tell fortunes, and recite poetry; and the launching of a theremin concert for aliens. He considers media used in attempts at extraterrestrial communication, from microwave systems to plaques on spacecrafts to formal logic, and discusses attempts to formulate a language for our message, including the Astraglossa and two generations of Lincos (lingua cosmica).

The chosen medium for interstellar communication reveals much about the technological sophistication of the civilization that sends it, Oberhaus observes, but even more interesting is the information embedded in the message itself. In Extraterrestrial Languages, he considers how philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, science, and art have informed the design or limited the effectiveness of our interstellar messaging.]]> 264 Daniel Oberhaus 0262043068 Rachel 0 to-read 3.57
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]]> 44319454
Approaching mattersĚýthrough the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to thisĚývolume, including the editors, as well as Andrew Cole, MladenĚýDolar, Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan,ĚýBorna Radnik, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Kathryn Van Wert,Ěýand Alenka ZupanÄŤič—many of whom stand at the forefrontĚýof contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship—agree withĚýneovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete,Ěýin a state of perpetual becoming, yet they maintainĚýthat this is the case not in spite of but, rather, because of theĚýsubject.

Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis,Ěýand literary and cultural studies, Subject Lessons contestsĚýthe movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there canĚýbe no truly robust materialism without accounting for the littleĚýpiece of the Real that is the subject.]]> 280 Russell Sbriglia 0810141388 Rachel 0 to-read 4.86
author: Russell Sbriglia
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]]> 10047209 430 Levi Bryant Rachel 0 to-read 3.73 2010
author: Levi Bryant
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]]> 201874043 Infinite Greed, Adrian Johnston argues that this consensus is mistaken. Through a novel synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, he reveals how the relentless pursuit of profits is not fundamentally animated by human acquisitiveness. Instead, capitalism’s strange “infinite greed� demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, their well-being, and even themselves to serve inhuman capital.

Johnston traces the mechanisms that compel capitalist subjects to obey the cold imperative to accumulate in perpetuity and without limits—and also without regard for the consequences for everyone and everything else. Facing crises such as spiraling wealth inequality and the profit-driven prospect of a looming ecological apocalypse, the rational self-interest of the majority would seem to dictate putting a stop to capitalist accumulation. By bringing together the Marxian critique of political economy with psychoanalytic metapsychology, Johnston shows why and how capitalism, rather than being responsive to people’s rationally selfish interests, disregards and overrides them instead.

Unlike previous syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Infinite Greed pairs Freudian and Lacanian concepts with the economic heart of Marx’s historical materialism. In so doing, Johnston brings to light the complex intertwining of political and libidinal economies keeping us invested and complicit in perpetuating capitalism and its ills.]]> 392 Adrian Johnston 0231214723 Rachel 0 to-read 4.17
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]]> 16100726 280 Adrian Johnston 0810129124 Rachel 0 to-read 3.76 2012
author: Adrian Johnston
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]]> 1088744 Johnston draws on Jacques Lacan's oeuvre in conjunction with certain philosophical resources-elements from transcendental philosophy, structuralism, and phenomenology-to rectify the inconsistencies within the Freudian metapsychological model of drive. In doing so, he helps to answer a question haunting Freud at the end of his career: Why is humanity plagued by a perpetual margin of discontent, despite technological and cultural progress?
In Time Driven, Johnston is able to make sense of Freud's metapsychology both as a whole and in its historical development of Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud, and of the place of both Freud and Lacan in modern philosophy.
]]> 421 Adrian Johnston 0810122057 Rachel 0 to-read 4.35 2005
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]]> 17242362


Merging three distinct disciplines--European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience--Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions.

Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.]]> 304 Adrian Johnston 023153518X Rachel 0 to-read 3.79 2013
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]]> 174518 376 Peter Weiss 0822335468 Rachel 0 to-read 4.21 1975
author: Peter Weiss
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.21
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]]> 199818669 340 Joel Franklin 100938970X Rachel 0 to-read 5.00
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]]> 218296937 188 Kirill Postoutenko 1032430184 Rachel 0 to-read 0.0
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]]> 222408404
The contributors work collaboratively to prove that many of the nondistributed complex systems in nature and society sooner or later experience critical development leading to unintended and irreversible self-annihilation. The individual chapters also show that the relations of such systems to their own distinctiveness and other systems may result in specific communicative pathologies (such as redundancy, inflation and noisy signalling) which tend to mitigate or reinforce each other, depending on circumstances. Finally, the volume updates some popular models of systemic self-destruction—from autoimmunity and self-organized criticality to imperial overstretch—and discusses some prominent cases (from supernova explosions to the civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917).

The interdisciplinary style of narration ensures the accessibility of the materials and theories presented for the specialists and students from different fields. As such, it will appeal to those interested in complexity studies from the areas of sociology, history, media and communication studies, immunology, computer science, literary criticism, cultural studies, political science and international relations.]]> 187 Kirill Postoutenko 1040304966 Rachel 0 to-read 0.0
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]]> 36288017
“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.� Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.

Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as, Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.]]> 359 Pascal Boyer 0300223455 Rachel 0 to-read 3.89
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]]> 52504853 Surveying the artistic and cultural scene in the era of Trump

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the Left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same?
What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second group reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are "machine vision" (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),"operational images" (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.]]> 208 Hal Foster 178873811X Rachel 0 to-read 3.76 2020
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]]> 111926 The Return of the Real, Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today.

After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s; Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real; to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites; If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde; it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation; and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.]]> 328 Hal Foster 0262561077 Rachel 0 to-read 4.05 1996
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]]> 53232173 How artists created an aesthetic of "positive barbarism" in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb

In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a "brutal aesthetics" adequate to the destruction around them.

With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with "human animals"? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap?

A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own.

Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.]]> 296 Hal Foster 0691202605 Rachel 0 to-read 4.50
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]]> 5962102 340 Robert Kegan 1422117367 Rachel 0 to-read 3.97 2009
author: Robert Kegan
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average rating: 3.97
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]]> 98900 256 Robert Kegan 078796378X Rachel 0 to-read 4.01 2000
author: Robert Kegan
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average rating: 4.01
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]]> 905156 396 Robert Kegan 0674445880 Rachel 0 to-read 4.21 1994
author: Robert Kegan
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average rating: 4.21
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]]> 25159550
In most organizations nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for—namely, covering their weaknesses, trying to look their best, and managing other people’s impressions of them. There may be no greater waste of a company’s resources. The ultimate cost: neither the organization nor its people are able to realize their full potential.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone —not just select “high potentials”—could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth?

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (and their collaborators) have found and studied such companies—Deliberately Developmental Organizations. A DDO is organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow . This means going beyond consigning “people development� to high-potential programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year off-sites. It means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.

An Everyone Culture dives deep into the worlds of three leading companies that embody this breakthrough approach. It reveals the design principles, concrete practices, and underlying science at the heart of DDOs—from their disciplined approach to giving feedback, to how they use meetings, to the distinctive way that managers and leaders define their roles. The authors then show readers how to build this developmental culture in their own organizations.

This book demonstrates a whole new way of being at work. It suggests that the culture you create is your strategy—and that the key to success is developing everyone .]]> 336 Robert Kegan 1625278624 Rachel 0 to-read 3.91 2016
author: Robert Kegan
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]]> 345095 The Evolving Self focuses upon the most basic and universal of psychological problems--the individual's effort to make sense of experience, to make meaning of life. According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the internal experience of growth and transition, its costs and disruptions as well as its triumphs.

At the heart of our meaning-making activity, the book suggests, is the drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other. Using Piagetian theory in a creative new way to make sense of how we make sense of ourselves, Kegan shows that each meaning-making stage is a new solution to the lifelong tension between the universal human yearning to be connected, attached, and included, on the one hand, and to be distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other. The Evolving Self is the story of our continuing negotiation of this tension. It is a book that is theoretically daring enough to propose a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex and clinically concerned enough to suggest a variety of fresh new ways to treat those psychological complaints that commonly arise in the course of development.

Kegan is an irrepressible storyteller, an impassioned opponent of the health-and-illness approach to psychological distress, and a sturdy builder of psychological theory. His is an original and distinctive new voice in the growing discussion of human development across the life span.]]> 336 Robert Kegan 0674272315 Rachel 0 to-read 4.22 1982
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]]> 7303702 152 Sanjoy Mahajan 026251429X Rachel 0 to-read 3.73 2010
author: Sanjoy Mahajan
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average rating: 3.73
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]]> 88941 War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging � in an entirely unprecedented manner � the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.

De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter—energy itself.

A Swerve Edition.]]> 333 Manuel DeLanda 0942299329 Rachel 0 to-read 4.20 1997
author: Manuel DeLanda
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]]> 156639 Manuel DeLanda is a distinguished writer, artist and philosopher. In his new book, he offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entities, from small communities to large nation-states, would disappear altogether if human minds ceased to exist, Delanda proposes a novel approach to social ontology that asserts the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them.]]> 160 Manuel DeLanda 0826491693 Rachel 0 to-read 3.79 2006
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]]> 10393464 240 Manuel DeLanda 1441170286 Rachel 0 to-read 3.91 2002
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]]> 217069220 With this reversal, the Viral Editor mutated into the Viral Inquisitor. Through the same mechanisms that the Viral Editor used to customize content for everyone, the Viral Inquisitor gathers identity signals of others and delivers them precisely to those whom they can alarm and agitate the most, making people watch each other’s reactions. The Viral Inquisitor is a new, dispersed, and all-pervading embodiment of Big Brother that always watches you.
The Viral Editor required everyone to participate in content selection. The Viral Inquisitor demands everyone’s solidarity with the most widely held views of others. Starting as the collective high priest of cancel culture, the Viral Inquisitor evolved into the great shaman of retribalization.
Media are the hardware of society, and culture is its software. Society follows the patterns set by media.
The book, written in style “McLuhan on steroids,� explores the cultural and cognitive shift from print-based literacy to digital orality. Through the lens of hard media determinism, The Viral Inquisitor analyzes the latest manifestations of this shift, ranging from the CNN-Fox News competition, the postjournalism of generative AI, and platforms enslaving users while serving them, to political polarization, the shifting epistemology of truth, and the impacts of screens on children.]]> 191 Andrey Mir 1777358949 Rachel 0 to-read 4.33
author: Andrey Mir
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]]> 202896182 “A major theme of Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror is that the internet has pushed us to �digital orality,� that is to say, to the forms of communication prevalent before the invention of writing. This brings in a long train of consequences, not least concerning the nature of truth.� � Martin Gurri, author of “The Revolt of the Public�

“Andrey Mir’s Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror describes the rise and fall of literate culture. Mir has sold me on the idea that what I think of as rational, scientific thinking comes from the way that our minds are shaped by reading. But as the written word gives way to electronic media, we are going to retreat from logic, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth.� � Arnold Kling, economist, author of “The Three Languages of Politics�

“An essential guide for understanding, getting on top of, and even improving the increasingly chaotic and dangerous world we all inhabit. Deeply researched, astutely reasoned, stylishly written, Mir’s latest book will become a classic in the study of media and their unpredictable effects.� � Paul Levinson, author of “Digital McLuhan�
***
This book explains digital tribalization.
Digital media have reversed print literacy and retrieved orality in a new form � in the form of digital orality.
Digital orality tests our tolerance by bringing other people much closer and even more intrusively than oral communication did � right onto our most intimate space, our screens.
Digital orality rewinds the historical Axial Age. According to Karl Jaspers (1949), the Axial Age (the 8th�3rd centuries BCE), was a period of human “awakening.� Humans became aware of their own existence, giving rise to historical consciousness. Fundamental philosophical and religious doctrines emerged in several ancient cultures.
At the time, there were no optics available to Jaspers to explain those pivotal changes. Meanwhile, in terms of media ecology, the Axial Age paralleled the spread of literacy. Writing allowed the “separation of the knower from the known� (Havelock) and the “inward turn� (Ong). Additionally, the “alphabet effect� (Logan) contributed to the emergence of monotheism, codified law, individualism, deductive logic, and abstract science. All these developments, enabled by literacy, occurred during Jaspers� Axial Age.
2.5 millennia ago, the transition from orality to literacy marked the shift from myth to logos, from magic to faith, from polytheism to monotheism, from customs to laws, from moral relativism to moral absolute, from practical and negotiated truths to objective and absolute truth, from environmental and collective immersion to abstract thinking and individual detachment, from the “circle of life� to personal destiny, from the agitation of tribal belonging to the individual tragedy of (not-)becoming.
Now, by reversing literacy and retrieving orality, digital media are replaying these processes backward. Media evolution thrusts us into a struggle between print literacy and digital orality.

Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror by Andrey Mir explores the digital future as the historical reversal of literacy through the lens of media determinism. The effects of orality and literacy are catalogued to observe which of them are reversed and retrieved in digital society. As soon as you accept this optic and see these effects, your life will become a captivating ethnographic expedition.]]> 332 Andrey Mir 1777358922 Rachel 0 to-read 4.71
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]]> 163789 144 Michael Friedman 0812694244 Rachel 0 to-read 3.84 2000
author: Michael Friedman
name: Rachel
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]]> 59149227
Richard Rorty, one of the most influential intellectuals of recent decades, is perhaps best known today as the philosopher who, almost two decades before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, warned of the rise of a Trumpian strongman in America. What Can We Hope For? gathers nineteen of Rorty’s essays on American and global politics, including four previously unpublished and many lesser-known and hard-to-find pieces.

In these provocative and compelling essays, Rorty confronts the critical challenges democracies face at home and abroad, including populism, growing economic inequality, and overpopulation and environmental devastation. In response, he offers optimistic and realistic ideas about how to address these crises. He outlines strategies for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust, and urges us to put our faith in trade unions, universities, bottom-up social campaigns, and bold political visions that thwart ideological pieties.

Driven by Rorty’s sense of emergency about our collective future, What Can We Hope For? is filled with striking diagnoses of today’s political crises and creative proposals for solving them.]]> 248 Richard Rorty 0691217521 Rachel 0 to-read 4.08
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]]> 161996 96 Aimé Césaire 0394173228 Rachel 0 to-read 3.41 1970
author: Aimé Césaire
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.41
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]]> 192354 311 Malidoma Patrice Somé Rachel 0 to-read 4.41 1994
author: Malidoma Patrice Somé
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.41
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]]> 34928261 A fascinating account of the breakthrough ideas that transformed probability and statistics

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact.

Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms begin with Girolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century physician, mathematician, and professional gambler who helped develop the idea that chance actually can be measured. They describe how later thinkers showed how the judgment of chance also can be measured, how frequency is related to chance, and how chance, judgment, and frequency could be unified. Diaconis and Skyrms explain how Thomas Bayes laid the foundation of modern statistics, and they explore David Hume's problem of induction, Andrey Kolmogorov's general mathematical framework for probability, the application of computability to chance, and why chance is essential to modern physics. A final idea--that we are psychologically predisposed to error when judging chance--is taken up through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Complete with a brief probability refresher, Ten Great Ideas about Chance is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to understand the secrets of probability and how they were discovered.]]> 272 Persi Diaconis 0691174164 Rachel 0 to-read 3.75 2017
author: Persi Diaconis
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.75
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]]> 186480 in behavioral finance, the book builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for the economic analysis of real-world markets.]]> 224 Andrei Shleifer 0198292279 Rachel 0 to-read 3.89 2000
author: Andrei Shleifer
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.89
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]]> 2458923 352 David Abraham 0841911185 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00 1981
author: David Abraham
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 62069739
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.Ěý

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 193 BenjamĂ­n Labatut Rachel 0 to-read 4.10 2020
author: BenjamĂ­n Labatut
name: Rachel
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]]> 203686742 public power from capture-an alternative vision that is at once more realistic and more inspiring.

Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the
advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases-and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike
must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the 21st century.]]> 437 Samuel Ely Bagg 0192665014 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00
author: Samuel Ely Bagg
name: Rachel
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]]> 1766828 330 Michel Henry 0253336805 Rachel 0 to-read 4.60 1976
author: Michel Henry
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.60
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]]> 26172329 Voting Deliberatively, Mary Stuckey examines little-discussed components of FDR’s 1936 campaign that aided his victory. She reveals four elements of this reelection campaign that have not received adequate attention: the creation of public opinion, the attention paid to local organizations, the focus on specific kinds of interests, and the public rhetoric that tied it all together. Previous studies of the 1936 presidential election discuss elements such as FDR’s vulnerability before the campaign and the weakness of Republican candidate Alf Landon. But these histories pay little attention to the quantity and quality of information Roosevelt acquired, the importance of organizations such as the Good Neighbor League and the Committee of One, the mobilization of the vote, and the ways in which these organizational strategies fused with Roosevelt’s rhetorical strategies. Stuckey shows how these facets combined in one of the largest victories in Electoral College history and provided a template for future victory.]]> 170 Mary E. Stuckey Rachel 0 to-read 5.00 2015
author: Mary E. Stuckey
name: Rachel
average rating: 5.00
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]]> 44890869 248 Nathan Crick 0271084812 Rachel 0 to-read 5.00
author: Nathan Crick
name: Rachel
average rating: 5.00
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]]> 17889219 232 Arabella Lyon 0271059753 Rachel 0 to-read 3.50 2013
author: Arabella Lyon
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.50
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]]> 174713 119 Will Durant 1567310249 Rachel 0 to-read 4.05
author: Will Durant
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.05
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> 209049954
In mainstream economics, markets are ideal if competition is perfect. When supply balances demand, economic maturity is orderly and disturbed only by shocks. These ideas are rooted in doctrines going back thousands of years yet, as James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen show, they contradict the foundations of our scientific understanding of the physical and biological worlds.

Entropy Economics discards the conventions of equilibrium and presents a new basis for thinking about economic issues, one rooted in life processes—an unequal world of unceasing change in which boundaries, plans, and regulations are essential. Galbraith and Chen’s theory of value is based on scarcity, and it accounts for the power of monopoly. Their theory of production covers increasing and decreasing returns, uncertainty, fixed investments over time, and the impact of rising resource costs. Together, their models illuminate key problems such as trade, finance, energy, climate, conflict, and demography.

Entropy Economics is a thrilling framework for understanding the world as it is and will be keenly relevant to the economic challenges of a world threatened with disorder.]]> 248 James K. Galbraith 0226827194 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00
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]]> 203746822 “If you read just one book about economics, make it Andrew Leigh's clear, insightful, and remarkable (and short) work.� —Claudia Goldin, recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics and Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University

A sweeping, engrossing history of how economic forces have shaped the world—all in under 200 pages

In How Economics Explains the World, Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh presents a new way to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, here is story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined our past, present, and future.Ěý

This small book indeed tells a big story. It is the story of capitalism � of how our market system developed. It is the story of the discipline of economics, and some of the key figures who formed it. And it is the story of how economic forces have shaped world history. Why didn’t Africa colonize Europe instead of the other way around? What happened when countries erected trade and immigration barriers in the 1930s? Why did the Allies win World War II? Why did inequality in many advanced countries fall during the 1950s and 1960s? How did property rights drive China’s growth surge in the 1980s? How does climate change threaten our future prosperity? You’ll find answers to these questions and more in How Economics Explains the World.]]> 240 Andrew Leigh 0063383802 Rachel 0 to-read 3.96
author: Andrew Leigh
name: Rachel
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]]> 433439

The Second Edition of this fundamental textbook maintains the book's tradition of clear, thought-provoking instruction. Readers are provided once again with an instructive mix of mathematics, physics, statistics, and information theory.

All the essential topics in information theory are covered in detail, including entropy, data compression, channel capacity, rate distortion, network information theory, and hypothesis testing. The authors provide readers with a solid understanding of the underlying theory and applications. Problem sets and a telegraphic summary at the end of each chapter further assist readers. The historical notes that follow each chapter recap the main points.

The Second Edition features:
* Chapters reorganized to improve teaching
* 200 new problems
* New material on source coding, portfolio theory, and feedback capacity
* Updated references

Now current and enhanced, the Second Edition of Elements of Information Theory remains the ideal textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in electrical engineering, statistics, and telecommunications.]]> 784 Thomas M. Cover 0471241954 Rachel 0 to-read 4.22 1991
author: Thomas M. Cover
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1991
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]]> 9802345 256 Alicia Juarrero 0984216480 Rachel 0 to-read 3.25 2010
author: Alicia Juarrero
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.25
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]]> 1052184
Alicia Juarrero argues that a mistaken, 350-year-old model of cause and explanation -- one that takes all causes to be of the push-pull, efficient cause sort, and all explanation to be prooflike -- underlies contemporary theories of action. Juarrero then proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems. Thinking of causes as dynamical constraints makes bottom-up and top-down causal relations, including those involving intentional causes, suddenly tractable. A different logic for explaining actions -- as historical narrative, not inference -- follows if one adopts this novel approach to long-standing questions of action and responsibility.]]> 300 Alicia Juarrero 0262600471 Rachel 0 to-read 4.40 1999
author: Alicia Juarrero
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.40
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]]> 62792811
Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence. In Context Changes Everything , Juarrero shows that coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes, and that the resulting coherence is then maintained by constitutive constraints. Constitutive constraints, in turn, become governing constraints that regulate and modulate the way coherent entities behave. Using the tools of complexity science, she offers a rigorously scientific understanding of identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world.

Juarrero argues that personal identity, which has been thought to be conferred through internal traits (essential natures), is grounded in dynamic interdependencies that keep coherent structures whole. This challenges our ideas of identity, as well as the notion that stability means inflexible rigidity. On the contrary, stable entities are brittle and cannot persist. Complexity science, says Juarrero, can shape how we meet the world, how what emerges from our interactions finds coherence, and how humans can shape identities that are robust and resilient. This framework has significant implications for sociology, economics, political theory, business, and knowledge management, as well as psychology, religion, and theology. It points to a more expansive and synthetic philosophy about who we are and about the coherence of living and nonliving things alike.]]> 296 Alicia Juarrero 0262545667 Rachel 0 to-read 3.50
author: Alicia Juarrero
name: Rachel
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]]> 12436503 Book by 432 Michael Dietler 1560988401 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00 1901
author: Michael Dietler
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1901
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> 21503600 440 Brian Hayden 1107617642 Rachel 0 to-read 5.00 2014
author: Brian Hayden
name: Rachel
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2014
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]]> 39948369 410 Brian Hayden 1108426395 Rachel 0 to-read 3.93
author: Brian Hayden
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.93
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]]> 43190851
Companion wiki � the book has a continuously updated wiki that extends some book chapters with additional information: Q&A, code snippets, further reading, tools, and other relevant resources.

Flexible price and formats � choose from a variety of formats and price options: Kindle, hardcover, paperback, EPUB, PDF. If you buy an EPUB or a PDF, you decide the price you pay!

Read first, buy later � download book chapters for free, read them and share with your friends and colleagues. Only if you liked the book or found it useful in your work, study or business, then buy it.]]> 159 Andriy Burkov Rachel 0 to-read 4.25
author: Andriy Burkov
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.25
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]]> 1098624 324 Manuel J. Smith 0553263900 Rachel 0 to-read 4.02 1975
author: Manuel J. Smith
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1975
rating: 0
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]]> 2861871 349 Hans Jonas 0136622216 Rachel 0 to-read 4.24 1974
author: Hans Jonas
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.24
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]]> 8214
At the center of this philosophy is an attack on the fundamental assumptions underlying modern philosophy since Descartes, primarily dualism. Dissenting from the dualistic view of value as a human projection onto nature, Jonas's critique affirms the classical view that being harbors the good. In a brilliant synthesis of the ancient and modern, Jonas draws upon existential philosophy to justify core insights of the classical tradition. This critique transcends the historical limits of its phenomenological methodology and existential ethical stance to take its place among the most scientifically nuanced contemporary accounts of moral nature. It lays the foundation for an ethic of responsibility grounded in an assignment by Being to protect the natural environment that has allowed us to spring from it.]]> 304 Hans Jonas 0810117495 Rachel 0 to-read 4.30 1966
author: Hans Jonas
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1966
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]]> 949423 448 Kenneth Burke 0520041488 Rachel 0 to-read 4.26 1984
author: Kenneth Burke
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1984
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]]> 4345670 150 Martin Clay Fowler 1594605033 Rachel 0 to-read 3.33 2008
author: Martin Clay Fowler
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.33
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]]> 428945 227 David Jones 1590170369 Rachel 0 to-read 3.98 1937
author: David Jones
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1937
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date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> 13698503 208 Samuel McCormick 027105073X Rachel 0 to-read 3.00 2011
author: Samuel McCormick
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.00
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]]> 50202951 chatter that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practices that sustain this form of human togetherness.Ěý

The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard’s work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger’s recuperative discussion of “idle talk� to Lacan’s culminating treatment of “empty speech”—and ultimately into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms now yields big data for tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

In this sense, The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about everyday talk, figured in terms of the intellectual elites who piqued this anxiety, and written with an eye toward recent dilemmas of digital communication and culture. By explaining how a quintessentially unproblematic form of human communication became a communication problem in itself, McCormickĚýshows how its conceptual history is essential to our understanding of media and communication today.]]> 336 Samuel McCormick 022667777X Rachel 0 to-read 5.00
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name: Rachel
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]]> 199727328
Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life , many of us are liberal without fully realizing it―or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values―our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more. This eye-opening book shows how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.

A lively, engaging, and uplifting guide to living well, the liberal way, Liberalism as a Way of Life is filled with examples from television, movies, stand-up comedy, and social media―from Parks and Recreation and The Good Place to the Borat movies and Hannah Gadsby. Along the way, you’ll also learn about seventeen benefits of being a liberal―including generosity, humor, cheer, gratitude, tolerance, and peace of mind―and practical exercises to increase these rewards.

You’re probably already waist deep in the waters of liberalism. Liberalism as a Way of Life invites you to dive in.]]> 304 Alexandre Lefebvre 0691203741 Rachel 0 to-read 3.61
author: Alexandre Lefebvre
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.61
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]]> 7442792
Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudo scientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, astonishing new research is revealing patterns in human behavior previously thought to be purely random. Precise, orderly, predictable patterns...

Albert Laszlo Barabasi, already the world's preeminent researcher on the science of networks, describes his work on this profound mystery in Bursts , a stunningly original investigation into human nature. His approach relies on the digital reality of our world, from mobile phones to the Internet and email, because it has turned society into a huge research laboratory. All those electronic trails of time stamped texts, voicemails, and internet searches add up to a previously unavailable massive data set of statistics that track our movements, our decisions, our lives. Analysis of these trails is offering deep insights into the rhythm of how we do everything. His finding? We work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing. The pattern isn't random, it's "bursty." Randomness does not rule our lives in the way scientists have assumed up until now.

Illustrating this revolutionary science, Barabasi artfully weaves together the story of a 16th century burst of human activity-a bloody medieval crusade launched in his homeland, Transylvania-with the modern tale of a contemporary artist hunted by the FBI through our post 9/11 surveillance society. These narratives illustrate how predicting human behavior has long been the obsession, sometimes the duty, of those in power. Barabási's astonishingly wide range of examples from seemingly unrelated areas include how dollar bills move around the U.S., the pattern everyone follows in writing email, the spread of epidemics, and even the flight patterns of albatross. In all these phenomena a virtually identical, mathematically described bursty pattern emerges.

Bursts reveals what this amazing new research is showing us about where individual spontaneity ends and predictability in human behavior begins. The way you think about your own potential to do something truly extraordinary will never be the same.]]> 310 Albert-László Barabási 0525951601 Rachel 0 to-read 3.25 2010
author: Albert-László Barabási
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.25
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]]> 2512183 232 Yuri Manin 0821843311 Rachel 0 to-read 4.25 2007
author: Yuri Manin
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.25
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]]> 6642700

Steven Medema explores what has been perhaps the central controversy in modern economics from Smith to today. He traces the theory of market failure from the 1840s through the 1950s and subsequent attacks on this view by the Chicago and Virginia schools. Medema follows the debate from John Stuart Mill through the Cambridge welfare tradition of Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall, and A. C. Pigou, and looks at Ronald Coase's challenge to the Cambridge approach and the rise of critiques affirming Smith's doctrine anew. He shows how, following the marginal revolution, neoclassical economists, like the preclassical theorists before Smith, believed government can mitigate the adverse consequences of self-interested behavior, yet how the backlash against this view, led by the Chicago and Virginia schools, demonstrated that self-interest can also impact government, leaving society with a choice among imperfect alternatives.



The Hesitant Hand demonstrates how government's economic role continues to be bound up in questions about the effects of self-interest on the greater good.]]> 248 Steven G. Medema 0691122962 Rachel 0 to-read 4.60 2009
author: Steven G. Medema
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.60
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]]> 200256915 "While an indisputable fact about human reality is that of communication and its corollary, making sense of what is communicated, only psychoanal-ysis takes notice of the particular situation created when communication happens between an adult and an the one who does not speak. Nor is it given much attention, even among psychoanalysts, that there is a special 'noise' carried over in the channels of communication between the two, a noise resulting from the difference regarding the uncon-scious sexual dimension." - DOMINIQUE SCARFONE
I proposed we have a conversation after each of your essays as a way to engage your work, to ask for clarifications on the reader's behalf, and to multiply the entry points to your thinking. I imagine that these conversations will work cumulatively, taking the reader deeper into each chapter and also showing your way of thinking not by describing it but by exposing the reader to it "in vivo". Part of what your work has offered me personally, which I hope these exchanges will also convey to the reader, is the sheer pleasure of thinking about theory with you- that it's not a stale or inert process but that, on the contrary, it is an experience in itself. - AVGI SAKETOPOULOU]]> 262 Dominique Scarfone 1942254229 Rachel 0 to-read 5.00
author: Dominique Scarfone
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]]> 126131496 223 Avgi Saketopoulou 1942254199 Rachel 0 to-read 4.41
author: Avgi Saketopoulou
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.41
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]]> 1404810
In a book that is bound to ignite controversy, Ruth Leys investigates the history of the concept of trauma. She explores the emergence of multiple personality disorder, Freud's approaches to trauma, medical responses to shellshock and combat fatigue, Sándor Ferenczi's revisions of psychoanalysis, and the mutually reinforcing, often problematic work of certain contemporary neurobiological and postmodernist theorists. Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other.

A powerfully argued work of intellectual history, Trauma will rewrite the terms of future discussion of its subject.]]> 336 Ruth Leys 0226477665 Rachel 0 to-read 3.61 2000
author: Ruth Leys
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.61
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]]> 1274404 In From Guilt to Shame , Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.]]> 216 Ruth Leys 0691130809 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00 2007
author: Ruth Leys
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 34524617 Ěý
Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.
Ěý]]> 416 Ruth Leys 022648856X Rachel 0 to-read 4.11
author: Ruth Leys
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]]> 342380 This lively and original book offers a provocative critique of the dominant assumptions regarding human action and communication which underlie recent research in machine intelligence. Lucy Suchman argues that the planning model of interaction favoured by the majority of AI researchers does not take sufficient account of the situatedness of most human social behaviour. The problems that can arise as a result are pertinently, and often amusingly, illustrated by the careful analysis of a recorded interaction between novice users and an intelligent machine, whose design has failed to accommodate essential resources of successful human communication. Plans and Situated Actions presents a compelling case for the re-examination of current models underlying interface design. Lucy Suchman's proposals for a fresh characterisation of human-computer interaction which also incorporates recent insights from the social sciences provides a challenge that everyone interested in machine intelligence will seriously need to consider.

]]> 203 Lucy A. Suchman 0521337399 Rachel 0 to-read 4.11 1987
author: Lucy A. Suchman
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1987
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]]> 1779926 328 Lucy A. Suchman 052167588X Rachel 0 to-read 3.74 2006
author: Lucy A. Suchman
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.74
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]]> 703532 Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers.]]> 252 Seymour Papert 0465046746 Rachel 0 to-read 4.33 1980
author: Seymour Papert
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1980
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]]> 13591145
Everybody's talking about the economy, but how can we, the people, understand what Wall Street or Washington knows--or say they know? Read "Economix."

With clear, witty writing and quirky, accessible art, this important and timely graphic novel transforms "the dismal science" of economics into a fun, fact-filled story about human nature and our attempts to make the most of what we've got . . . and sometimes what our neighbors have got. "Economix "explains it all, from the beginning of Western economic thought, to markets free and otherwise, to economic failures, successes, limitations, and future possibilities. It's the essential, accessible guide to understanding the economy and economic practices. A must-read for every citizen and every voter.PRAISE FOR "ECONOMIX
"
"It's simply phenomenal. You could read ten books on the subject and not glean as much information."-- David Bach founder of FinishRich Media; author of nine "New York Times" bestsellers, including "Debt Free for Life" and "The Automatic Millionaire" "Goodwin has done the seemingly impossible--he has made economics comprehensible "and" funny."-- Joel Bakan, author of "The Corporation" "The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" "An amazing lesson in true-world economics Delightfully presented, powerful, insightful, and important information What a fun way to fathom a deep and often dark subject "-- John Perkins, author of "Hoodwinked" and the "New York Times" bestseller "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" "Smart, insightful, clear, and as close to the truth as economics can get. The bonus: Who would have guessed that economics could be fun, and--here's the joy--really accessible? Goodwin roots us in history and fills us with common sense understanding. As he puts it early on, economics seems horribly complicated mostly because we're looking at it all at once. Broken down into its component pieces, it's relatively easy to understand. And a good understanding of economics is critical to maneuvering in the world today. If I were compiling a list of the 100 most important books you can read in a lifetime, this would be on it."--Stephen Petranek, editor-in-chief, Weider History magazines, former editor-in-chief of "Discover" magazine "Through a potent mix of comics and punchy, concise, accessible prose, Goodwin takes us on a provocative, exhaustively researched, and exceedingly engaging trip through our history and present day, creating an alternately hilarious and scary picture of where we are today as an economy-- and what it all means. More than that, Goodwin makes the arcane, understandable. If your mind either spins or slumbers at the thought of economics, read Goodwin's "Economix" and all will become clear. --Nomi Prins, author of "It Takes a Pillage: An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and Untold Trillions" ""Economix" is a lively, cheerfully opinionated romp through the historical and intellectual foundations of our current economy and our current economic problems. Goodwin has a knack for distilling complex ideas and events in ways that invite the reader to follow the big picture without losing track of what actually happened. Any reader wondering how our economy got to where it is today will find this a refreshing overview."--Timothy W. Guinnane, Philip Golden Bartlett Professor of Economic History, Yale University]]> 304 Michael Goodwin 0810988399 Rachel 0 to-read 4.32 2012
author: Michael Goodwin
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.32
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]]> 2468956 272 Joel Bakan 080200461X Rachel 0 to-read 4.40 1997
author: Joel Bakan
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.40
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]]> 108583 The Corporation contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality, whose destructive behavior, if unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin.

Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution. Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.

In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations:

-The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others.
-The corporation’s unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal.
-Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization.

But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control.

Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike.]]> 228 Joel Bakan 0743247469 Rachel 0 to-read 4.08 2003
author: Joel Bakan
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 44679105 520 Grietje Baars 9004392866 Rachel 0 to-read 4.50
author: Grietje Baars
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.50
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]]> 40537234
That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees � to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy � has become a new site of social struggle.

In clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization. Above all, he articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.]]> 192 Michel Feher 1942130120 Rachel 0 to-read 4.64
author: Michel Feher
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]]> 17465709 Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.]]> 408 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1571313354 Rachel 0 to-read 4.52 2013
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.52
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]]> 53337 511 George Lakoff 0465037712 Rachel 0 to-read 3.97 2000
author: George Lakoff
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2000
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]]> 2549700 352 Meir Sternberg 0253355524 Rachel 0 to-read 4.50 1978
author: Meir Sternberg
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.50
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date added: 2024/10/23
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]]> 197636554 270 C. Edward Watson 1421449226 Rachel 0 to-read 3.91
author: C. Edward Watson
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.91
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]]> 1248048
Arguing that Americans have misconceived the relation between democracy, private property, and the economic order, the author contends that we can achieve a society of real democracy and political equality without sacrificing liberty by extending democratic principles into the economic order. Although enterprise control by workers violates many conventional political and ideological assumptions of corporate capitalism as well as of state socialism. Dahl presents an empirically informed and philosophically acute defense of "workplace democracy." He argues, in the light of experiences here and abroad, that an economic system of worker-owned and worker-controlled enterprises could provide a much better foundation for democracy, political equality, and liberty than does our present system of corporate capitalism.]]> 192 Robert A. Dahl 0520058771 Rachel 0 to-read 3.81 1956
author: Robert A. Dahl
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.81
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]]> 49209300 A concise account of how revolutions made modern China and helped shape the modern worldChina’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,� a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful� place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China’s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a “return,� but rather as the product of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary activity and imaginings. From the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century through nationalist, anti-imperialist, cultural, and socialist revolutions to today’s capitalist-inflected Communist State, modern China has been made in intellectual dissonance and class struggle, in mass democratic movements and global war, in socialism and anti-socialism, in repression and conflict by multiple generations of Chinese people mobilized to seize history and make the future in their own name. Through China’s successive revolutions, the contours of our contemporary world have taken shape. This brief interpretive history shows how.]]> 240 Rebecca E. Karl 1788735617 Rachel 0 to-read 3.60 2020
author: Rebecca E. Karl
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2020
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]]> 8567495 216 Rebecca E. Karl 0822347954 Rachel 0 to-read 3.84 2009
author: Rebecca E. Karl
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2009
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]]> 323068 368 Carl Shapiro 087584863X Rachel 0 to-read 4.05 1998
author: Carl Shapiro
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1998
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date added: 2024/10/02
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]]> 60484909 Charles Thorpe Rachel 0 to-read 0.0
author: Charles Thorpe
name: Rachel
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]]> 10483997 96 John Bolender 1845401972 Rachel 0 to-read 2.00 2011
author: John Bolender
name: Rachel
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2011
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]]> 10383403 208 John Bolender 0262014440 Rachel 0 to-read 3.80 2010
author: John Bolender
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2010
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]]> 1787841
Dynamic Patterns brings together different aspects of this approach to the study of human behavior, using simple experimental examples and illustrations to convey essential concepts, strategies, and methods, with a minimum of mathematics.

Kelso begins with a general account of dynamic pattern formation. He then takes up behavior, focusing initially on identifying pattern-forming instabilities in human sensorimotor coordination. Moving back and forth between theory and experiment, he establishes the notion that the same pattern-forming mechanisms apply regardless of the component parts involved (parts of the body, parts of the nervous system, parts of society) and the medium through which the parts are coupled. Finally, employing the latest techniques to observe spatiotemporal patterns of brain activity, Kelso shows that the human brain is fundamentally a pattern forming dynamical system, poised on the brink of instability. Self-organization thus underlies the cooperative action of neurons that produces human behavior in all its forms.]]> 358 J.A. Scott Kelso 0262611317 Rachel 0 to-read 3.98 1995
author: J.A. Scott Kelso
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.98
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]]> 3011552 317 J.A. Scott Kelso 0262612224 Rachel 0 to-read 3.88 2006
author: J.A. Scott Kelso
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.88
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]]> 4983911 Book by Shibutani, Tamotsu 262 Tamotsu Shibutani 0672608235 Rachel 0 to-read 3.86 1966
author: Tamotsu Shibutani
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/28
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]]> 632163 455 Tamotsu Shibutani 0520035240 Rachel 0 to-read 0.0 1978
author: Tamotsu Shibutani
name: Rachel
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]]> 13690406 presentation as persons capable of self-applying the law, capable of presenting and arguing a point of view, and capable of responding to law's demands without brute coercion. Together the two lectures illuminate the relation between dignity conceived as the ground of rights and dignity conceived as the content of rights; they also illuminate important ideas about dignity as noble bearing and dignity as the subject of a right against degrading treatment; and they help us understand the sense in which dignity is better conceived as a status than as a kind of value.]]> 176 Jeremy Waldron 0199915431 Rachel 0 to-read 3.57 2012
author: Jeremy Waldron
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2012
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]]> 162804280 0 Nick Nesbitt Rachel 0 to-read 0.0 2008
author: Nick Nesbitt
name: Rachel
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]]> 196021480 0 unknown author Rachel 0 to-read 0.0
author: unknown author
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]]> 133752665 0 Simon Schama Rachel 0 to-read 3.00 1989
author: Simon Schama
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.00
book published: 1989
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]]> 7312390 360 Jason Frank 0822346753 Rachel 0 to-read 3.65 2009
author: Jason Frank
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.65
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]]> 18696907 Book by White, Harrison C. 433 Harrison C. White 0674437195 Rachel 0 to-read 4.00 2013
author: Harrison C. White
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 6950073

White argues that the key to economic action is that producers seek market niches to maximize profit and minimize competition. As they do so, they base production decisions not only on anticipated costs from suppliers and anticipated demand from buyers, but also by looking at their competitors. In fact, White asserts, producers act less in response to actual demand than by anticipating they gauge where competitors have found demand and thus determine what they can do that is similar and yet different enough to give themselves a special niche.


Building on these and related insights, White creates new mathematical models of how the economy works and how the interaction of its sectors creates mutual protection from the uncertainties of business. These models provide new ways of accounting for profits, prices, market shares, and other vital economic phenomena. He shows, for example, that prices are determined by the coalescing of local variables rather than set in terms of averages as implied by the ''law'' of supply and demand. The model of ''pure'' competition favored by economics is deficient, he concludes, as it fails to account for the varied circumstances of particular industries.


Throughout, White draws extensively on case studies of American businesses and on recent mathematical and sociological work on networks. Rivaling standard economic theories with its rich empirical grounding, sheer originality, and scholarly rigor, Markets from Networks will resonate in economics and economic sociology for years to come.]]> 416 Harrison C. White 0691120382 Rachel 0 to-read 3.80 2001
author: Harrison C. White
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.80
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]]> 2875174 456 Harrison C. White 0691137153 Rachel 0 to-read 3.96 1992
author: Harrison C. White
name: Rachel
average rating: 3.96
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]]> 62039221
“Jackson Lears is the preeminent cultural historian of the American empire. This book is another masterpiece in his magisterial corpus.� ―Cornel West

A master historian’s retrieval of the spiritual visions and vitalisms that animate American life and the possibilities they offer today.

In Animal Spirits , the distinguished historian Jackson Lears explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer�) and the “New Thought� pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within―rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am."

Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors� “animal spirits,� these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition―permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos.

Includes 8 pages of black-and-white images]]> 464 Jackson Lears 0374290229 Rachel 0 to-read 3.80
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]]> 981312
In this volume, Loy presents the materials of music (notes, intervals, and scales); the physical properties of music (frequency, amplitude, duration, and timbre); the perception of music and sound (how we hear); and music composition. Musimathics is carefully structured so that new topics depend strictly on topics already presented, carrying the reader progressively from basic subjects to more advanced ones. Cross-references point to related topics and an extensive glossary defines commonly used terms. The book explains the mathematics and physics of music for the reader whose mathematics may not have gone beyond the early undergraduate level. Calling himself "a composer seduced into mathematics," Loy provides answers to foundational questions about the mathematics of music accessibly yet rigorously. The topics are all subjects that contemporary composers, musicians, and musical engineers have found to be important. The examples given are all practical problems in music and audio. The level of scholarship and the pedagogical approach also make Musimathics ideal for classroom use. Additional material can be found at a companion web site.]]> 482 Gareth Loy 0262122820 Rachel 0 to-read 4.36 2006
author: Gareth Loy
name: Rachel
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2006
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]]>