Losing It: Americas Obsession With Weight and the Industry That Feeds on It
Author: Laura Fraser File Type: pdf Americas never-ending quest for slimness bombards us from every television screen, drugstore aisle, and shopping mall. In this fast-paced and fascinating expose, veteran journalist Laura Fraser goes undercover to look at this countrys obsession with being thin. Her meticulously researched journey through Dietland shows how the biggest hucksters since P. T. Barnum create and exploit our worries about weight. Frasers reporting takes her inside doctors offices, marketing seminars, weight-loss spas, and medical conferences. Posing as a patient, she investigates diet doctors and weight-loss scams, undergoing injections, hypnosis, and cookie diets along the way. She interviews weight-loss celebrities such as Richard Simmons, Susan Powter, and Dean Ornish. The results are eye-opening, dramatic - and entertaining. She convincingly demonstrates that far from helping most people lose weight, the vast majority of these Dietland profiteers contribute to our weight obsession - and our obesity.
Author: Deborah Rudacille
File Type: pdf
When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why. Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angleshistorical, sociological, psychological, medicalRudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing ones gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain. Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the authors interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, The Riddle of Gender is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being. **
Author: Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
File Type: pdf
The contradictory trends of the post-Arab Spring landscape form both the backdrop to, and the focus of, this volume on the changing security dynamics of the Persian Gulf, defined as the six GCC states plus Iraq and Iran. The political and economic upheaval triggered by the uprisings of 2011, and the rapid emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in 2014, have underscored the vulnerability of regional states to an intersection of domestic pressures and external shocks. The initial phase of the uprisings has given way to a series of messy and uncertain transitions that have left societies deeply fractured and ignited violence both within and across states. The bulk of the protests, with the notable exception of Bahrain, occurred outside the Gulf region, but Persian Gulf states were at the forefront of the political, economic, and security response across the Middle East. This volume provides a timely and comparative study of how security in the Persian Gulf has evolved and adapted to the growing uncertainty of the post-2011 regional landscape. **
Author: João Cabral de Melo Neto
File Type: epub
Brings together a representative selection of the work of one of Brazils most respected poets, including many poems published in English for the first time.**
Author: Jennifer Kling
File Type: pdf
The current refugee crisis is unparalleled in history in its size and severity. According to the UNHCR, there are roughly 67 million refugees worldwide, the vast majority of whom are refugees as the result of wars and other military actions. This social and political crisis cries out for normative explanation and analysis. Morally and politically, how should we understand the fact that 1 in every 122 humans is a refugee? How should we respond to it, and why?Jennifer Kling argues that war refugees have suffered, and continue to suffer, a series of harms, wrongs, and oppressions, and so are owed recompense, restitution, and aidas a matter of justiceby sociopolitical institutions around the world. She makes the case that war refugees should be viewed and treated differently than migrants, due to their particular circumstances, but that their circumstances do not wholly alleviate their own moral responsibilities. We must stop treating refugees as objects to be moved around on the global stage, Kling contends, and instead see them as people, with their own subjective experiences of the world, who might surprise us with their words and works.While targeted toward students and scholars of philosophy, War Refugees Risk, Justice, and Moral Responsibility will also be of interest to those working in political science, international relations, and foreign policy analysis, and, more broadly, to anyone who is interested in thinking critically about the ongoing refugee crisis.
Author: Thomas Hirschhorn
File Type: pdf
For the artist Thomas Hirschhorn, writing is a crucial tool at every stage of his artistic practice. From the first sketch of an idea to appeals to potential collaborators, from detailed documentation of projects to post-disassembly analysis, Hirschhorns writings mark the trajectories of his work. This volume collects Hirschhorns widely scattered texts, presenting many in English for the first time.In these writings, Hirschhorn discusses the full range of his art, from works on paper to the massive Presence and Production projects in public spaces. Statements and Letters address broad themes of aesthetic philosophy, politics, and art historical commitments. Projects consider specific artworks or exhibitions. Interviews capture the artist in dialogue with Benjamin Buchloh, Jacques Ranciere, and others. Throughout, certain continuities emerge Hirschhorns commitment to quotidian materials the centrality of political and economic thinking in his work and his commitment to art in the public sphere. Taken together, the texts serve to trace the artists ideas and artistic strategies over the past two decades. Critical Laboratory also reproduces, in color, 33 Ausstellungen im offentlichen Raum 1998--1989, an out-of-print catalog of Hirschhorns earliest works in public space.**
Author: Victoria L. Rovine
File Type: pdf
African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.
Author: Gerald M. Weinberg
File Type: epub
For more than twenty-five years, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking has been hailed as an innovative introduction to systems theory, with applications in computer science and beyond. Used in university courses and professional seminars all over the world, the text has proven its ability to open minds and sharpen thinking.Originally published in 1975 and reprinted more than twenty times over a quarter century-and now available for the first time from Dorset House Publishing-the text uses clear writing and basic algebraic principles to explore new approaches to projects, products, organizations, and virtually any kind of system.Scientists, engineers, organization leaders, managers, doctors, students, and thinkers of all disciplines can use this book to dispel the mental fog that clouds problem-solving. As author Gerald M. Weinberg writes in the new Preface to the Silver Anniversary Edition, I havent changed my conviction that most people dont think nearly as well as they could had they been taught some principles of thinking.Now an award-winning author of nearly forty books spanning the entire software development life cycle-including The Psychology of Computer Programming Silver Anniversary Edition and Exploring Requirements (with Donald C. Gause)-Weinberg had already acquired extensive experience as a programmer, manager, university professor, and consultant when this book was originally published.With helpful illustrations, numerous end-of-chapter exercises, and an appendix on a mathematical notation used in problem-solving, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking may be your most powerful tool in working with problems, systems, and solutions.
Author: Malik Gaines
File Type: epub
Articulatesthe role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left illustrates the black political ideas that radicalized the artistic endeavors of musicians, playwrights, and actors beginning in the 1960s. These ideas paved the way for imaginative models for social transformation through performance. Using the notion of excessits transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalenceMalik Gaines considers how performances of that era circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling commonplace understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following the transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, and other modern political actors, from the United States to West Africa, Europe and back, this book considers how artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday lifefrom American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Gunther Kaufmann, to California-based performer SylvesterGaines explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction. Bringing the lens forward through contemporary art performance at the 2015 Venice Biennial, Gaines connects the idea of sixties radicality to todays interest in that history, explores the aspects of those politics that are lost in translation, and highlights the black expressive strategies that have maintained potent energy. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left articulatesthe role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties, following the evolution of black identity politics to reveal blacknesss ability to transform contemporary social conditions. **