Download or read book Showcasing the Great Experiment written by Michael David-Fox and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Showcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism, it reinterprets one of the great cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Living Books written by Janneke Adema and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

Download or read book The Power of Experiments written by Michael Luca and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How tech companies like Google, Airbnb, StubHub, and Facebook learn from experiments in our data-driven world—an excellent primer on experimental and behavioral economics Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of different online experiences. Once an esoteric tool for academic research, the randomized controlled trial has gone mainstream. No tech company worth its salt (or its share price) would dare make major changes to its platform without first running experiments to understand how they would influence user behavior. In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world. Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber. Successful experiments can save companies money—eBay, for example, discovered how to cut $50 million from its yearly advertising budget—or bring to light something previously ignored, as when Airbnb was forced to confront rampant discrimination by its hosts. Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that governments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader's toolkit. With this book, readers can become part of “the experimental revolution.”

Download or read book Art Fear written by David Bayles and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I always keep a copy of Art & Fear on my bookshelf' JAMES CLEAR, author of the #1 best-seller Atomic Habits 'A book for anyone and everyone who wants to face their fears and get to work' DEBBIE MILLMAN, author and host of the podcast Design Matters 'A timeless cult classic ... I've stolen tons of inspiration from this book over the years and so will you' AUSTIN KLEON, NYTimes bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist 'The ultimate pep talk for artists. ... An invaluable guide for living a creative, collaborative life.' WENDY MACNAUGHTON, illustrator Art & Fear is about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. Drawing on the authors' own experiences as two working artists, the book delves into the internal and external challenges to making art in the real world, and shows how they can be overcome every day. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic, and word-of-mouth has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity. Written by artists for artists, it offers generous and wise insight into what it feels like to sit down at your easel or keyboard, in your studio or performance space, trying to do the work you need to do. Every artist, whether a beginner or a prizewinner, a student or a teacher, faces the same fears - and this book illuminates the way through them.

Download or read book A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear written by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.

Download or read book An Experiment in Leisure written by Anna Glendenning and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I adore this book! ... An Experiment in Leisure shows us the burning, intense, messy beauty of youth and what it means to be alive' Maxine Peake 'Can I get a refund?' I asked the bus driver. 'You taking the piss, love?' It's the eve of Brexit, and Grace is supposed to have what she wants. She's swapped West Yorkshire for north London, her accent carefully edited. Her friends drink beer out of artful tins. She makes flat whites for people with berets. She's found a psychoanalyst. But this fantasy of metropolitan cool is turning out to be more costly than she thought and Grace faces complicated crises of identity, class, sexuality and geography. Can she remember how to love? Can she find a way home? 'A dizzying yet powerful read' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19

Download or read book Cocktail Chemistry written by Nick Fisher and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Cocktail Chemistry offers the essential knowledge, techniques, and flair for creating perfectly mixed drinks at home.” —Bartender Magazine Enjoy clever, pop culture-inspired drinks with this collection of more than 80 recipes from the beloved Cocktail Chemistry YouTube channel. Have you ever seen a delicious-looking drink on your favorite movie or TV show and wondered how to make it? Well, now you can, with this collection of recipes from the creator of the popular Cocktail Chemistry YouTube channel Nick Fisher. Featuring recipes to recreate the classic White Russian from The Big Lebowski, the iconic martini from the James Bond movies, to drinks featured in Mad Men, The Simpsons, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Game of Thrones, The Office, Harry Potter, and more, Cocktail Chemistry will have you impressing your friends with your bartending skills in no time. In addition to recipes, Cocktail Chemistry includes everything you need to know to become a mixology expert, from how to make perfectly clear ice, delicious foams, and infusions, or how to flame a citrus peel. A must-have for all aspiring home mixologists and pop-culture buffs, Cocktail Chemistry will ensure you never have a boring drink again.

Download or read book Cultivating the Masses written by David L. Hoffmann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.

Download or read book The Summer Experiment written by Cathie Pelletier and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-07-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roberta McKinnon, age 11, is a science nerd and big dreamer. She likes to add to this resume, “And guess what? I'm blonde!” She and her best friend, Marilee Evans, are trying to figure out how to beat the impossibly brilliant Henry Horton Harris Helmsby---the 4 Hs of the Apocalypse---at the upcoming science fair. Allagash, Maine, their little hometown, is famous for something called “The Allagash Abductions,” when four men from Vermont claimed to have been taken aboard a spaceship while on a trip down the Allagash River. Robbie McKinnon puts her brain to work and comes up with a solution. “If aliens visited Allagash before, they might again. What if we try to contact them? If we interview them for the school paper, we’ll win science fair for sure!” But standing in the way is her annoying big brother Johnny, and his best friend, Billy, on whom Robbie has her first crush. After a mean trick played on the girls (it has to do with fake aliens appearing in town) Robbie decides revenge is in the air. It'll serve Johnny and Billy right. But it means they have to drive their 4-wheelers up on Peterson's Mountain after sundown. Everyone knows the mountain is haunted by the ghost of Cally Peterson. It’s while up on the mountain that the girls see for the first time those strange lights in the sky that many townsfolk have been spotting. “This time it isn't your crazy brother,” says a frightened Marilee. It’s a summer of excitement, but it’s also marked by sadness over a death in the family. By the time school is starting again, these two wise young girls have grown even wiser.

Download or read book Crossing Borders written by Michael David-Fox and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2015-07-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crossing Borders deconstructs contemporary theories of Soviet history from the revolution through the Stalin period, and offers new interpretations based on a transnational perspective. To Michael David-Fox, Soviet history was shaped by interactions across its borders. By reexamining conceptions of modernity, ideology, and cultural transformation, he challenges the polarizing camps of Soviet exceptionalism and shared modernity and instead strives for a theoretical and empirical middle ground as the basis for a creative and richly textured analysis. Discussions of Soviet modernity have tended to see the Soviet state either as an archaic holdover from the Russian past, or as merely another form of conventional modernity. David-Fox instead considers the Soviet Union in its own light—as a seismic shift from tsarist society that attracted influential visitors from the pacifist Left to the fascist Right. By reassembling Russian legacies, as he shows, the Soviet system evolved into a complex “intelligentsia-statist” form that introduced an array of novel agendas and practices, many embodied in the unique structures of the party-state. Crossing Borders demonstrates the need for a new interpretation of the Russian-Soviet historical trajectory—one that strikes a balance between the particular and the universal.

Download or read book The Art of Experiment written by Ketty Gottardo and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A showcase of the Courtauld Gallery's outstanding Parmigianino collection. Accompanying an exhibition at London's Courtauld Gallery, this stunning catalog presents works by the Renaissance artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503-1540). Fundamentally a draftsman at heart, Parmigianino drew relentlessly during his relatively short life, and around a thousand of his drawings have survived. The Courtauld's collection comprises twenty-four sheets. In preparation for the catalog, new photography and technical examinations have been carried out on all the works, revealing two new drawings that were previously unknown, hidden underneath their historic mounts. They have also helped to better identify connections between some of the drawings and the finished paintings for which they were conceived. This stunning illustrated catalog presents the whole Courtauld collection and sheds light on an artist who approached every technique with unprecedented freedom and produced innovative works that are still admired by artists and collectors today.

Download or read book Natural Experiments of History written by Jared Diamond and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can't be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world. In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.

Download or read book The Sunita Experiment written by Mitali Perkins and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When her grandparents come for a visit from India to California, thirteen-year-old Sunita finds herself resenting her Indian heritage and embarrassed by the differences she feels between herself and her friends.

Download or read book Moscow the Fourth Rome written by Katerina Clark and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the "Third Rome." By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world. Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today-transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin. Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

Download or read book Balkan Legacies written by John Paul Newman and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Balkan Legacies is a study of the aftermath of war and state socialism in the contemporary Balkans. The authors look at the inescapable inheritances of the recent past and those that the present has to deal with. The book’s key theme is the interaction, often subliminal, of the experiences of war and socialism in contemporary society in the region. Fifteen contributors approach this topic from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and through a variety of interpretive lenses, collectively drawing a composite picture of the most enduring legacies of conflict and ideological transition in the region, without neglecting national and local peculiarities. The guiding questions addressed are: what is the relationship between memories of war, dictatorship (communist or fascist), and present-day identity—especially from the perspective of peripheral and minority groups and individuals? How did these components interact with each other to produce the political and social culture of the Balkan Peninsula today? The answers show the ways in which the experiences of the latter part of the twentieth century have defined and shaped the region in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book French Political Travel Writing in the Interwar Years written by Martyn Cornick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies travel writing produced by French authors between the two World Wars following visits to authoritarian regimes in Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It sheds new light on the phenomenon of French political travel in this period by considering the well-documented appeal of Soviet communism for French intellectuals alongside their interest in other radical regimes which have been much less studied: fascist Italy, the Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany. Through analyses of the travel writing produced as a result of such visits, the book gauges the appeal of these forms of authoritarianism for inter-war French intellectuals from a broad political spectrum. It examines not only those whose political sympathies with the extreme right or extreme left were already publicly known, but also non-aligned intellectuals who were interested in political models that offered an apparently radical alternative to the French Third Republic. This study shows how travel writing provided a space for reflection on the lessons France might learn from the radical political experiments of the inter-war years. It argues that such writing can usefully be read as a form of utopian thinking, distinguishing this from colloquial understandings of utopia as an ideal location. Utopianism is understood neither as a fantasy ungrounded in the real nor as a dangerously totalitarian ideal, but, in line with Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricœur, and Ruth Levitas, as a form of non-congruence with the real that it seeks to transcend. The utopianism of French political travel writing is seen to lie not in the attempt to portray the destination visited as utopia, but rather in the pursuit of a dialogue with radical political alterity.

Download or read book The Discovery of Dragons written by Graeme Base and published by Viking. This book was released on 2007 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brand-new edition of the classic book of Serpentology brought to you by the brilliant Graeme Base Was Bjorn of Bromme one of the greatest explorers of the Viking Age or just a simple-minded, lice-infested Barbarian with a passion for beach volleyball? Could Soong Mei Ying really have discovered every Asiatic Dragon known to Serpentology, or was she just a thirteenth-century teenage who wanted to travel and meet people? Did Dr E. F. Liebermann perish after discovering the Common Green Draak, also known as the 'Awful Gurgler', or was he suffering from a severe bout of jungle madness? The answers to these questions and more will not be found within the pages of this book - but a lot of great big Dragons will . . . Visit graemebase.com