Author: Sheldon S. Wolin File Type: pdf Sheldon Wolin was one of the most influential and original political thinkers of the past fifty years. Fugitive Democracy brings together his most important writings, from classic essays such as Political Theory as a Vocation, written amid the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam, to his late radical essays on American democracy such as Fugitive Democracy, in which he offers a controversial reinterpretation of democracy as an episodic phenomenon distinct from the routinized political management that passes for democracy today. The breathtaking range of Wolins scholarship, political commitment, and critical acumen are on full display in this authoritative and accessible collection. He critically engages a diverse range of political theorists, including Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty. These essays grapple with topics such as power, modernization, the sixties, revolutionary politics, and inequality, all the while showcasing Wolins enduring commitment to writing civic-minded theoretical commentary on the most pressing political issues of the day. Here, Wolin laments the rise of conservatives who style themselves as revolutionary, criticizes Rawlsian liberals as abstract to the point of being apolitical, diagnoses postmodern theory as a form of acquiescence, and much more. Fugitive Democracy offers enduring insights into many of todays most pressing political predicaments, and introduces a whole new generation of readers to this provocative figure in contemporary political thought. **
Author: Thomas Hauser
File Type: pdf
Thomas Hauser is best known as Muhammad Alis biographer and for his recording of the contemporary boxing scene. Booklist called Hauser the most respected boxing journalist working today and perhaps the best ever. Robert Lipsyte said Hauser is the best boxing writer of our time. Still, Hausers love of sports began not with boxing but with baseball. Long before he turned to the sweet science, Americas national pastime had captured his heart. His childhood allegiance was to the New York Yankees. Growing up in the suburbs of New York, he cheered for the Giants in football and Knicks in basketball. In college, the often-hapless Columbia Lions became his cause. Thomas Hauser on Sports brings together Hausers articles on sports other than boxing. It combines personal memories with issue-oriented commentary and an intimate look at some of the most remarkable athletes of modern times. Hauser has dealt one-on-one with Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Arnold Palmer, Pete Rose, Arthur Ashe, Wilt Chamberlain, and other giants of sports. He has crossed swords with the likes of Marvin Miller and Howard Cosell. Thomas Hauser on Sports is a remarkable journey that begins in the days of Hausers youth and follows the games we play into the era of steroids and multi-billion-dollar television contracts. **
Author: Christina Hoff Sommers
File Type: pdf
Philosophy professor Christina Sommers has exposed a disturbing development how a group of zealots, claiming to speak for all women, are promoting a dangerous new agenda that threatens our most cherished ideals and sets women against men in all spheres of life. In case after case, Sommers shows how these extremists have propped up their arguments with highly questionable but well-funded research, presenting inflammatory and often inaccurate information and stifling any semblance of free and open scrutiny. Trumpeted as orthodoxy, the resulting findings on everything from rape to domestic abuse to economic bias to the supposed crisis in girls self-esteem perpetuate a view of women as victims of the patriarchy. Moreover, these arguments and the supposed facts on which they are based have had enormous influence beyond the academy, where they have shaken the foundations of our educational, scientific, and legal institutions and have fostered resentment and alienation in our private lives. Despite its current dominance, Sommers maintains, such a breed of feminism is at odds with the real aspirations and values of most American women and undermines the cause of true equality. Who Stole Feminism? is a call to arms that will enrage or inspire, but cannot be ignored.
Author: Mikhail Iampolski
File Type: pdf
The concept of intertextuality has proven of inestimable value in recent attempts to understand the nature of literature and its relation to other systems of cultural meaning. In The Memory of Tiresias, Mikhail Iamposlki presents the first sustained attempt to develop a theory of cinematic intertextuality.Building on the insights of semiotics and contemporary film theory, Iampolski defines cinema as a chain of transparent, mimetic fragments intermixed with quotations he calls textual anomalies. These challenge the normalization of meaning and seek to open reading out onto the unlimited field of cultural history, which is understood in texts as a semiotically active extract, already inscribed.Quotations obstruct mimesis and are consequently transformed in the process of semiosis, an operation that Iampolski defines as reading in an aura of enigma. In a series of brilliant analyses of films by D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Luis Bunuel, he presents different strategies of intertextual reading in their work. His book suggests the continuing centrality of semiotic analysis and is certain to interest film historians and theorists, as well as readers in cultural and literary studies.Language NotesText English (translation)Original Language Russian From the Inside FlapIampolski deals with concepts and ideas that are highly complex and frequently very abstract, yet his discussion--and the progression of his analyses--is always precise and easy to follow. . . . Each of his points is grounded in a careful examination of a specific text, and most of the texts are well-known to American audiences.--Vladimir Padunov, University of Pittsburgh
Author: Tim Wu
File Type: epub
From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch and who coined the phrase net neutrality--a revelatory look at the rise of attention harvesting, and its transformative effect on our society and our selves. Attention merchant an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the attention merchants, contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a centurys growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to TVs golden age to our present age of radically individualized choices, the business model of attention merchants has always been the same. He describes the revolts that have risen against these relentless attempts to influence our consumption, from the remote control to FDA regulations to Apples ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants grow ever-new heads, and their means of harvesting our attention have given rise to the defining industries of our time, changing our nature--cognitive, social, and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago. **