A building that eats smog. An inflatable concert hall. A research lab that can walk through snow. We’re entering a new age in architecture—one where we expect our buildings to deliver far more than just shelter. We want buildings that inspire us while helping the environment; buildings that delight our senses while serving the needs of a community; buildings made possible both by new technology and repurposed materials.Like an architectural cabinet of wonders, this book collects the most innovative buildings of today and tomorrow. The buildings hail from all seven continents (to say nothing of other planets), offering a truly global perspective on what lies ahead. Each page captures the soaring confidence, the thoughtful intelligence, the space-age wonder, and at times the sheer whimsy of the world’s most inspired buildings—and the questions they provoke: Can a building breathe? Can a skyscraper be built in a day? Can we 3D-print a house? Can we live on the moon?Filled with gorgeous imagery and witty insight, this book is an essential and delightful guide to the future being built around us—a future that matters more, and to more of us, than ever.

    Drawing on a wide range of  great writers, from Philip Roth to Antonin Scalia to Jane Austen, How to Write a Sentence is much more than a writing manual—it is a spirited love letter to the written word, and a key to understanding how great writing works.

    As the world’s population has grown, our cities have burgeoned, and their impact on the environment worsened. Meanwhile, from the isolated, gated communities within Houston and Los Angeles, to the millions of residents of Bombay living in squalor, the city has failed to serve its ideal function—as the cradle of civilization, the engine of culture, and the inspiration for community and citizenship. In Cities for a Small Planet, Sir Richard Rogers, one of the world’s leading architects and the designer of the Pompidou Center in Paris, demonstrates how future cities could provide the springboard for restoring humanity’s harmony with its environment.Rogers outlines the disastrous impact cities have had and will continue to have on our world, from waste-saturated Tokyo Bay, to the massive plumes of pollution caused by London’s traffic, to the depleted water resources of Mexico City. He traces these problems to the underlying social and cultural values that create them—unchecked commercial zeal, selfish individualism, and a lack of community. Bringing to bear concepts such as that of “open-minded” space—places within cities that serve multiple functions such as markets, parks, and sidewalk cafes—he explains how urban design can be used to give citizens a sense of shared experience. The city built with comfortable and safe public space can bring diverse groups together and breed a sense of tolerance, awareness, identity, and mutual respect. He calls for a new theoretical shift in the way cities do business and interact with the environment, arguing that many products come to market and are sold without figuring their social or environmental cost.Rogers goes on to describe the city of the future: one that is sustainable within its own environment; that can make a positive impact on its surroundings; that encourages communication among its citizens; that is compact and focused around neighborhoods; and that is beautiful, a city whose buildings and spaces spark the creative potential of its inhabitants.As our population grows larger, our planet grows smaller. Cities for a Small Planet is a passionate and eloquent blueprint for the cities we must create in response, cities that provide for the needs of both their residents and the earth on which they live.

    Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the juxtaposition of uninflected images. The best films, Mamet argues, are composed of simple shots. The great filmmaker understands that the burden of cinematic storytelling lies less in the individual shot than in the collective meaning that shots convey when they are edited together. Mamet borrows many of his ideas about directing, writing, and acting from Russian masters such as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein, and Vsevelod Pudovkin, but he presents his material in so delightful and lively a fashion that he revitalizes it for the contemporary reader.

    This opinion, commonplace among published as well as aspiring writers, struck Nisi as taking the easy way out and spurred her to write an essay addressing the problem of how to write about characters marked by racial and ethnic differences. In the course of writing the essay, however, she realized that similar problems arise when writers try to create characters whose gender, sexual preference, and age differ significantly from their own. Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers' skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about ''getting it wrong.'' Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with ''differences.''

    Many societies have struggled with the architectural and urban consequences of women's paid employment: Hayden traces three models of home in historical perspective—the haven strategy in the United States, the industrial strategy in the former USSR, and the neighborhood strategy in European social democracies—to document alternative ways to reconstruct neighborhoods. Updated and still utterly relevant today as the New Urbanist architects have taken up Hayden's critique of suburban space, this award-winning book is essential reading for architects, planners, public officials, and activists interested in women's social and economic equality.

    They manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal. They are irresistibly charming and accomplished, appearing to live in a radiance beyond what we are capable of. But narcissists are empty. No one knows exactly what everyone else is full of--some kind of a soul, or personhood--but whatever it is, experts agree that narcissists do not have it.So goes the popular understanding of narcissism, or NPD (narcissistic personality disorder). And it's more prevalent than ever, according to recent articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time. In bestsellers like The Narcissism Epidemic, Narcissists Exposed, and The Narcissist Next Door, pop psychologists have armed the normal with tools to identify and combat the vampiric influence of this rising population, while on websites like narcissismsurvivor.com, thousands of people congregate to swap horror stories about relationships with "narcs."In The Selfishness of Others, the essayist Kristin Dombek provides a clear-sighted account of how a rare clinical diagnosis became a fluid cultural phenomenon, a repository for our deepest fears about love, friendship, and family. She cuts through hysteria in search of the razor-thin line between pathology and common selfishness, writing with robust skepticism toward the prophets of NPD and genuine empathy for those who see themselves as its victims. And finally, she shares her own story in a candid effort to find a path away from the cycle of fear and blame and toward a more forgiving and rewarding life.

    Our lives are in constant tether to phones, to email, and to social media. In this age of distraction, the ability to experience and be present is often lost: to think and to see and to listen.Enter Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing--an inspiring volume that will help you see the world anew. Through a series of simple and playful exercises--131 of them--Walker maps ways for you to become a clearer thinker, a better listener, a more creative workplace colleague, and finally, to rediscover what really matters to you.

    Sontag develops further the concept of 'transparency'. When anything can be photographed and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

    But she never tackled the role of teacher.Offered the opportunity to teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas, she took up the challenge and ventured into unknown territory. In the process of teaching more than two hundred students since her first class in 2000, she has found inspiration in their lives and ambitions and in the challenge of conveying to them the lessons she has learned from living and writing.The Writing Life brings together fifty essays and vignettes centered on the transforming magic of literature and the teaching and writing of it. A portion of the collection discusses the delicate balance between an artistic life and family commitments, especially the daily pressures and frequent compromises faced by a young mother. Gilchrist next focuses on the process of writing itself with essays ranging from "How I Wrote a Book of Short Stories in Three Months" to "Why Is Rewriting so Hard?"Several essays discuss her appreciation of other writers, from Shakespeare to Larry McMurtry, and the lessons she learned from them. Eudora Welty made an indelible impact on Gilchrist's work. When Gilchrist takes on the task of teaching, her essays reveal an enriched understanding of the role writing plays in any life devoted to the craft. Humorous and insightful, she assesses her own abilities as an instructor and confronts the challenge of inspiring students to attain the discipline and courage to pursue the sullen art. Some of these pieces have been previously published in magazines, but most are unpublished and all appear here in book form for the first time.

    It also: * Applies the latest passive energy and lighting design research * Organizes information by architectural elements at three scales: * building groups, individual buildings, and building parts * Brings design strategies to life with examples and practical design tools * Features: * 109 analysis techniques and design strategies * More than 750 illustrations, sizing graphs, and tables * Both inch-pound and metric units

    Learn to plot without fear of error, to enjoy a process that keeps your story fresh, to adapt your plot to brilliant middle-of-the-book inspiration WITHOUT derailing your writing process, and much more. Holly Lisle's Create A Plot Clinic is a funny, relaxed, and comprehensive start-to-finish course with a step-by-step process that includes worksheets, examples, and how-to advice for writers of every genre, and for every experience level---from absolute beginner with no idea how to get started, to published pro looking for an easier way to beat a tight deadline.

    P. Rose—a visionary in urban development and renewal—champions the role of cities in addressing the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century.Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the world’s population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, education and health disparities, among many others.In The Well-Tempered City, Jonathan F. P. Rose—the man who “repairs the fabric of cities”—distills a lifetime of interdisciplinary research and firsthand experience into a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape our cities with the goal of equalizing their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of “temperament” as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilization and nature. These goals may never be fully achieved, but our cities will be richer and happier if we aspire to them, and if we infuse our every plan and constructive step with this intention.A celebration of the city and an impassioned argument for its role in addressing the important issues in these volatile times, The Well-Tempered City is a reasoned, hopeful blueprint for a thriving metropolis—and the future.

    This easy, breezy handbook is full of insight that will help regular people begin a more inspiring and less stressful relationship with art. With tips on how to visit museums, how to talk about art at cocktail parties, and how to let art wake you up to the world around you, this little guide makes it possible for anyone to fall in love with art, whether for the first time or all over again.

    First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.