Everything Is Workable gives readers the tools they need for dynamic, vital, and effective relationships, both personal and professional. Diane Musho Hamilton draws on her years of experience as a professional mediator, Zen practitioner, and student of Ken Wilber's Integral Philosophy to present a spiritual approach to conflict resolution, providing teachings along with practices and exercises that can be applied to any sort of relationship in which conflict is a factor.Few people would say they like conflict. Most of us try like heck to avoid it. If we take up meditation practice, we often expect that to make conflict go away. But . . . surprise! It never does. We still disagree with each other, argue, get hurt, say things we didn't mean to say. It's at the very least inconvenient. It's often also destructive. We're stuck with conflict as long as we're human beings with jobs, relationships, or dry cleaning to be picked up. Meditation practice enables us to touch the inner source of clarity, understanding, compassion, and peace--yet the equanimity that we cultivate on the cushion does not always translate into skillfulness in the way we handle conflict in our personal lives. Interpersonal conflict ends up being the most difficult and painful part of our path. Though meditation is incomparably helpful, it doesn't make the sticky interpersonal issues go away. Conflict resolution skills are needed. Diane Musho Hamilton suggests that we make conflict resolution a valued part of our practice.

    Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

    This provocative book undertakes a new and challenging reading of recent semiotic and structuralist theory, arguing that films, novels, and poems cannot be studied in isolation from their viewers and readers.

    

    A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel's setting, characters, and incidents on real-life places, people, and events. The novel sold more than 30 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and it was adapted into a hit Hollywood film in 1957 and a popular television series that aired from 1964 to 1969. More than half a century later, the term "Peyton Place" is still in circulation as a code for a community harboring sordid secrets.In Unbuttoning America, Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon. She argues that Peyton Place, with its frank discussions of poverty, sexuality, class and ethnic discrimination, and small-town hypocrisy, was more than a tawdry potboiler. Metalious s depiction of how her three central female characters come to terms with their identity as women and sexual beings anticipated second-wave feminism. More broadly, Cameron asserts, the novel was also part of a larger postwar struggle over belonging and recognition. Fictionalizing contemporary realities, Metalious pushed to the surface the hidden talk and secret rebellions of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America."

    But beneath its glitzy surface, postmodernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was the forcing ground of “post truth,” by means of which western values were turned upside down. But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world?In this brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and still dominates our lives today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, among others: David Bowie, the iPod, Madonna, Jeff Koons’s the Nixon Shock, Judith Butler, Las Vegas, Margaret Thatcher, Grand Master Flash, I Love Dick, the RAND Corporation, the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, Grand Theft Auto, Jean Baudrillard, Netflix, and 9/11.We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything other than suffer from buyer’s remorse?

    A collection of twenty of Paglia's out-spoken essays on contemporary issues in America's ongoing cultural debate such as Anita Hill, Robert Mapplethorpe, the beauty myth, and the decline of education in America.

    It begins by introducing students to the basics of communication systems without using probabilistic theory. Only after a solid knowledge base--an understanding of how communication systems work--has been built are concepts requiring probability theory covered. This third edition has been thoroughly updated and revised to include expanded coverage of digital communications. New topics discussed include spread-spectrum systems, cellular communication systems, global positioning systems (GPS), and an entire chapter on emerging digital technologies (such as SONET, ISDN, BISDN, ATM, and video compression). Ideal for the first communication systems course for electrical engineers, Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems offers students a superb pedagogical style; it consistently does an excellent job of explaining difficult concepts clearly, using prose as well as mathematics. The author makes every effort to give intuitive insights--rather than just proofs--as well as heuristic explanations of theoretical results wherever possible. Featuring lucid explanations, well-chosen examples clarifying abstract mathematical results, and excellent illustrations, this unique text is highly informative and easily accessible to students.

    However, figuring out how to tell it interactively - can be challenging. This work provides examples of contemporary games that rely on different technologies - and learn the storytelling lessons to be garnered from each of the past methodologies.

    policies have taken on civilians around the world and the role activists are (or aren’t) playing to stop the carnage. The Western world was stunned to wake up on 9-11 to find that the Third World had "pushed back." By ignoring the suffering and loss of life of their victims while grieving over our own, Amercans have made themselves complicit in their government’s global slaughter. In a heartwrenching recount, Churchill reminds us of the untold millions who have perished as a result of U.S. military intervention (in either a physical, diplomatic or economic sense) in Iraq, Cambodia, Palestine, East Timor, the Americas . . . and the list goes on.To further illustrate his point, included are annotated chronologies of U.S. military actions from 1776 to the present and a compilation of International Laws either broken or ignored by the United States. Comprehensive, yet remaining concise, this book cannot be overlooked by those still asking: "Why do they hate us?""Few are as eloquent or as able to maintain lucidity for the lay reader as is Churchill."—Bloomsbury Review"Ward Churchill has carved out a special place for himself in defending the rights of oppressed people, and -exposing the dark side of past and current history, often marginalized or suppressed. These are achievements of inestimable value."—Noam ChomskyWard Churchill is co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, a national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, and an associate professor of American Indian Studies and Communications at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Author of more than a dozen titles, he is also an indefatigable lecturer on government repression, American Indian affairs and global politics.

    For nearly three years, Whitman immersed himself in the devastation of the Civil War, tending to thousands of wounded soldiers and recording his experience with an immediacy and compassion unequaled in wartime literature anywhere in the world. In The Better Angel, acclaimed biographer Roy Morris, Jr. gives us the fullest accounting of Whitman's profoundly transformative Civil War Years and an historically invaluable examination of the Union's treatment of its sick and wounded. Whitman was mired in depression as the war began, subsisting on journalistic hackwork, wasting his nights in New York's seedy bohemian underground, his great career as a poet apparently stalled. But when news came that his brother George had been wounded at Fredericksburg, Whitman rushed south to find him. Though his brother's injury was slight, Whitman was deeply affected by his first view of the war's casualties. He began visiting the camp's wounded and, almost by accident, found his calling for the duration of the war. Three years later, he emerged as the war's most unlikely hero, a living symbol of American democratic ideals of sharing and brotherhood. Instead of returning to Brooklyn as planned, Whitman continued to visit the wounded soldiers in the hospitals in and around the capital. He brought them ice cream, tobacco, brandy, books, magazines, pens and paper, wrote letters for those who were not able and offered to all the enormous healing influence of his sympathy and affection. Indeed, several soldiers claimed that Whitman had saved their lives. One noted that Whitman seemed to have what everybody wanted and added When this old heathen came and gave me a pipe and tobacco, it was about the most joyful moment of my life. Another wrote that There is many a soldier that never thinks of you but with emotions of the greatest gratitude. But if Whitman gave much to the soldiers, they in turn gave much to him. In witnessing their stoic suffering, in listening to their understated speech, and in being always in the presence of death, Whitman evolved the new and more direct poetic style that was to culminate in his masterpiece, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, The Better Angel explores a side of Whitman not fully examined before, one that greatly enriches our understanding of his later poetry. More than that, it gives us a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the other army--the legions of sick and wounded soldiers who are usually left in the shadowy background of Civil War history--seen here through the unflinching eyes of America's greatest poet.

    Delivered in New York in February 1860, the Cooper Union speech dispelled doubts about Lincoln's suitability for the presidency and reassured conservatives of his moderation while reaffirming his opposition to slavery to Republican progressives. Award-winning Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer places Lincoln and his speech in the context of the times -- an era of racism, politicized journalism, and public oratory as entertainment -- and shows how the candidate framed the speech as an opportunity to continue his famous "debates" with his archrival Democrat Stephen A. Douglas on the question of slavery. Holzer describes the enormous risk Lincoln took by appearing in New York, where he exposed himself to the country's most critical audience and took on Republican Senator William Henry Seward of New York, the front runner, in his own backyard. Then he recounts a brilliant and innovative public relations campaign, as Lincoln took the speech "on the road" in his successful quest for the presidency.

    This is an investigation into the history of this idea.

    Leslie Morgan Steiner has been there. As an executive at The Washington Post, a writer, and mother of three, she has lived and breathed every side of the “mommy wars.” Rather than just watch the battles rage, Steiner decided to do something about it. She commissioned twenty-six outspoken mothers to write about their lives, their families, and the choices that have worked for them. The result is a frank, surprising, and utterly refreshing look at American motherhood.Ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-two and scattered across the country from New Hampshire to California, these mothers reflect the full spectrum of lifestyle choices. Women who have been home with the kids from day one, moms who shuttle from full-time office jobs to part-time at-home work, hard-driving executives who put in seventy-hour-plus weeks: they all get a turn. The one thing these women have in common, aside from having kids, is that they’re all terrific writers. Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley vividly recounts how her generation stormed the American workplace–only to take refuge at home when the workplace drove them out. Lizzie McGuire creator Terri Minsky describes what it felt like to hear her kids scream “I hope you never come back!” when she flew to L.A. to launch the show that made her career. Susan Cheever, novelist, biographer, and New York Newsday columnist, reports on the furious battles between the stroller pushers and the briefcase bearers on the streets of Manhattan. Lois R. Shea traded the journalistic fast track for a house in the country where she could raise her daughter in peace. Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff, chief operating officer of the Women’s National Basketball Association, argues fiercely that you can combine ambition and motherhood–and have a blast in the process.Candid, engaging, by turns unflinchingly honest and painfully funny, the essays collected here offer an astonishingly intimate portrait of the state of motherhood today. Mommy Wars is a book by and for and about the real experts on motherhood and hard work: the women at home, in the office, on the job every day of their lives.From the Hardcover edition.

    This is a handbook of sorts, a manual to be used in debunking future lies before future wars have a chance to begin. For more information visit WarIsALie.org.