Book picks similar to
What a Body Can Do by Ben Spatz
critical-theory
education
synopticated
the-mind
Against Method
Paul Karl Feyerabend - 1975
He argues that the only feasible explanations of scientific successes are historical explanations, and that anarchism must now replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
Iain McGilchrist - 2009
In a book of unprecedented scope, McGilchrist draws on a vast body of recent brain research, illustrated with case histories, to reveal that the difference is profound—not just this or that function, but two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world. The left hemisphere is detail oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things & is inclined to self-interest. The right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility & generosity. This division helps explain the origins of music & language, & casts new light on the history of philosophy, as well as on some mental illnesses. The 2nd part of the book takes a journey thru the history of Western culture, illustrating the tension between these two worlds as revealed in the thought & belief of thinkers & artists, from Aeschylus to Magritte. He argues that, despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with potentially disastrous consequences.List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionAsymmetry and the brain --What do the two hemispheres 'do'? --Language, truth and music --The nature of the two worlds --The primacy of the right hemisphere --The triumph of the left hemisphere --Imitation and the evolution of culture --The ancient world --The Renaissance and the Reformation --The Enlightenment --Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution --The modern and post-modern worldsConclusionNotes BibliographyIndex
The Sound Inside
Adam Rapp - 2020
As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher. Brimming with suspense, Rapp's riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.
I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-and-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion
Nancy Barile - 2021
She made her place behind the boards and right in the front row as insurgents such as SSD, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys and Black Flag wrote new rules and made history. She survived punk riots and urban decay, ran the streets with outcasts, and ultimately found true love as she fought for fairness and found her purpose.
Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up
Patricia Ryan Madson - 2005
No matter how carefully we formulate a “script,” it is bound to change when we interact with people with scripts of their own. Improv Wisdom shows how to apply the maxims of improvisational theater to real-life challenges—whether it’s dealing with a demanding boss, a tired child, or one of life’s never-ending surprises. Patricia Madson distills thirty years of experience into thirteen simple strategies, including “Say Yes,” “Start Anywhere,” “Face the Facts,” and “Make Mistakes, Please,” helping readers to loosen up, think on their feet, and take on everything life has to offer with skill, chutzpah, and a sense of humor.
The Norton Psychology Reader
Gary F. Marcus - 2005
Editor Gary Marcus has carefully selected brief readings, mostly from popular trade books, that are both relevant and interesting to the introductory student.
How to Read and Understand Shakespeare
Marc C. Conner - 2013
His language and culture - those of Elizabethan England - are greatly different from our own, and his poetry, thick with metaphorical imagery and double meanings, can be hard to penetrate.Yet the keys to understanding Shakespeare are written into the plays themselves. If you can learn to recognize the playwright's own clues, you'll become able to engage meaningfully with his language, to follow the plot structures and themes that drive his plays, and to track the development of his characters.Over the course of 24 lectures, this innovative and penetrating exploration of Shakespeare's plays reveals how to enter Shakespeare's dramatic world, how to grasp what's happening in any of his plays, and how to enjoy them fully both on the page and the stage.Under Professor Conner's expert guidance, shaped by decades of studying and performing Shakespeare, you learn more than 40 interpretive tools, drawn from the texts themselves, that give you direct insight into the plays. These guiding principles allow you to follow the narratives of the plays as they unfold, with a clear understanding of how the plays function and fit together.The professor also reveals fascinating details of Shakespeare's era, which shed further light on the plays and the way his contemporary audiences perceived them.This course builds the skills that allow you to reach your own understanding of the plays - to deeply comprehend Shakespeare's transcendent poetic language, the spellbinding world of his great characters and stories, and his revelatory reflections on human experience.Disclaimer: Please note that this recording may include references to supplemental texts or print references that are not essential to the program and not supplied with your purchase.©2013 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2013 The Great Courses
Pipeline
Dominique Morisseau - 2017
. . this passionate play about a family struggling to outrun social prophecy is potent and intensely acted." --The New York Times"Pipeline showcases an American play wright in full blaze." --Huffington Post"This is a writer who has a flawless ear for the way kids see the world and their ability to navigate it with surgical eloquence." --DeadlineNya, an inner-city teacher, is desperate to give her only son, Omari, opportunities he'd otherwise never have in the flawed public education system. When an incident at his private school threatens to get him expelled, Nya must con- front the full weight of the impact her parenting decisions have made on her son. Inspired by the "school-to-prison" pipeline that ensnares people of color, Morisseau brings us a powerful play that delves into issues of class, race, parenting, and education in America and questions the systematic structures that ultimately trap underserved communities.Dominique Morisseau's plays include Detroit '67, Paradise Blue, Skeleton Crew, Sunset Baby, Follow Me to Nellie's, Third Grade, Black at Michigan, Socks, Roses Are Played Out, and Love and Nappiness. Morisseau is a recipient of the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, two NAACP Image Awards, a commendation from the Primus Prize by the American Theatre Critics Association, and the winner of the 2012 Barrie and Bernice Stavis Play wright Award by National Theatre Conference.
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
Annette Lareau - 2003
Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.The first edition of Unequal Childhoods was an instant classic, portraying in riveting detail the unexpected ways in which social class influences parenting in white and African-American families. A decade later, Annette Lareau has revisited the same families and interviewed the original subjects to examine the impact of social class in the transition to adulthood.
How to Think Clearly: A Guide to Critical Thinking
Doug Erlandson - 2012
Dr. Doug Erlandson draws on concrete examples of good and bad reasoning from the political and social realm and everyday life to make his points in a sometimes lighthearted but always meaningful way. Here's a Preview of What's in the Book
Identifying the differences between good and bad arguments
Avoiding fallacies
Creating good explanations
Assessing probabilities
Recognizing that statistics and numbers can lie
˃˃˃ Here's How You Benefit How to Think Clearly gives you the tools you need to critically assess the claims and counterclaims with which you are bombarded by politicians, pundits, commentators and editors, as well as coworkers, friends and family, and will aid you in developing skills to present your view in ways that are clear, coherent, sensible and persuasive. ˃˃˃ Suitable as a classroom text and for independent study How to Think Clearly is easy to understand and suitable for independent study. At the same time it offers the content and intellectual rigor that you would expect in a text for an introductory college-level course in critical thinking. ˃˃˃ What Others Are Saying About How to Think Clearly: A Guide to Critical Thinking Dr. Erlandson has given a wonderful introduction to good critical thinking: how to recognize good and bad arguments, helpful and non-helpful explanations, the ways that numbers can be manipulated. You can tell that he must be a good teacher. (G. Feltner)The author offers a refuge of reason within our culture of disregard for open-mindedness and rational discourse where the popular debate of serious issues or ideas is often a shouting match from the margins. (Cubs Fan)A great read for anyone who is new to logic and critical thinking, or someone who just wants to review and refresh their knowledge. (Paul D.)
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Mind Over Mother: Every mum's guide to worry and anxiety in the first years
Anna Mathur
She offers little nuggets of gold while reminding us to point some of our kindness and love inwards.' Giovanna Fletcher, bestselling author of Happy Mum, Happy Baby 'Anna is breath of fresh air - relatable, funny and wise' Sarah Turner, bestselling author of The Unmumsy MumBaby-proof the house; panic-proof the mum.Do you overthink what you said to the mum in the supermarket queue? Is your internal dialogue more critical than kind? Perhaps you wake to check your baby is breathing, or the sight of a rash sends you down an internet search rabbit hole. Whatever your level of anxiety, however much it impacts your life, this book is for you.Anxiety is making motherhood a less pleasant, more fraught and pressured experience, and we do not have to accept joy-sapping worry and energy-draining overthinking as part of the motherhood job description. In Mind Over Mother, Anna Mathur, psychotherapist and mum of three, explains how to:* Understand anxiety, why it affects you and what to do about it* Make your mind a kinder, calmer, happier place to be* Transform your motherhood experience by addressing your thinkingThe most powerful tool Anna has to communicate this isn't the letters after her name, it is the fact that she is open about her own experience of maternal anxiety. By sharing her journey, she gives you the confidence to reframe yours.Mind Over Mother is full of light bulb moments of realisation. It will have you learning, laughing and loving yourself through the journey of motherhood. You will learn to address the most important conversation you'll ever have - the one inside your head, because investing in your mental health is the best gift you can offer yourself and your child.
Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind
Scott Barry Kaufman - 2015
Revealing the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, along with engaging examples of artists and innovators throughout history, the book shines a light on the practices and habits of mind that promote creative thinking. Kaufman and Gregoire untangle a series of paradoxes— like mindfulness and daydreaming, seriousness and play, openness and sensitivity, and solitude and collaboration – to show that it is by embracing our own contradictions that we are able to tap into our deepest creativity. Each chapter explores one of the ten attributes and habits of highly creative people: Imaginative Play * Passion * Daydreaming * Solitude * Intuition * Openness to Experience * Mindfulness * Sensitivity * Turning Adversity into Advantage * Thinking Differently With insights from the work and lives of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Edison, Josephine Baker, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, musician Thom Yorke, chess champion Josh Waitzkin, video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and many other creative luminaries, Wired to Create helps us better understand creativity – and shows us how to enrich this essential aspect of our lives.
The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee - 2007
We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.