Download or read book The Spectacular written by Zoe Whittall and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People. “In the best books, characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twenty-two years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border. Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again. In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.

Download or read book The Democratization of Artificial Intelligence written by Andreas Sudmann and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a long time of neglect, Artificial Intelligence is once again at the center of most of our political, economic, and socio-cultural debates. Recent advances in the field of Artifical Neural Networks have led to a renaissance of dystopian and utopian speculations on an AI-rendered future. Algorithmic technologies are deployed for identifying potential terrorists through vast surveillance networks, for producing sentencing guidelines and recidivism risk profiles in criminal justice systems, for demographic and psychographic targeting of bodies for advertising or propaganda, and more generally for automating the analysis of language, text, and images. Against this background, the aim of this book is to discuss the heterogenous conditions, implications, and effects of modern AI and Internet technologies in terms of their political dimension: What does it mean to critically investigate efforts of net politics in the age of machine learning algorithms?

Download or read book Big Potential written by Shawn Achor and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With cutting-edge research, penetrating insights, and practical examples, Shawn Achor describes a new conception of ‘success,’ and in doing so, reveals exciting new strategies we can use to meet our highest potential.”—Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of The Happiness Project “A vibrant book on how to bring out the best in others—and how they can bring out the best in us.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast WorkLife In a world that thrives on competition and individual achievement, we’re measuring and pursuing potential incorrectly. Pursuing success in isolation—pushing others away as we push ourselves too hard—not only limits our potential but makes us more stressed and disconnected than ever. Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor reveals a better approach. With exciting new research combining neuroscience and psychology with Big Data, Achor shows that our potential is not limited by what we alone can achieve. Instead, it is determined by how we complement, contribute to, and benefit from the abilities and achievements of people around us. When we—as individuals, leaders, and parents—chase only individual achievement, we leave vast sources of potential untapped. But once we put “others” back into the equation, and work to make others better, we ignite a Virtuous Cycle of cascading successes that amplify our own. The dramatic shifts in how we approach work today demand an equally dramatic shift in our approach to success. In Big Potential, Achor draws on cutting-edge original research as well as his work with nearly half of the Fortune 100 and with places like NASA, the NFL and the NBA, and offers a new path to thriving in the modern world.

Download or read book The Death of Christian Culture written by John Senior and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1978.

Download or read book Visual Global Politics written by Roland Bleiker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 795 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a visual age. Images and visual artefacts shape international events and our understanding of them. Photographs, film and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, diplomacy, financial crises and election campaigns. Other visual fields, from art and cartoons to maps, monuments and videogames, frame how politics is perceived and enacted. Drones, satellites and surveillance cameras watch us around the clock and deliver images that are then put to political use. Add to this that new technologies now allow for a rapid distribution of still and moving images around the world. Digital media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, play an important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns. This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today’s world.

Download or read book Before Happiness written by Shawn Achor and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Win the Crowd written by Steve Cohen and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-06-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Would You Like to Become More Commanding, Convincing, And Charismatic? In this book, Steve Cohen, master magician and star of the long-running Chamber Magic show in New York City, will reveal the secrets of all great showmen and magicians—how to persuade, influence, and charm, and ultimately accomplish the things you've always wanted to do. As Cohen writes, "You'll discover how to take over a room, read people, and build anticipation to a feverish pitch so people are burning to hear what you have to say." Win the Crowd will teach you Steve Cohen's Maxims of Magic, simple rules you can use to take charge of practically any situation, from on-the-job disagreements to dating to important cocktail parties. The Maxims of Magic will wash away insecurities and hesitations, and replace them with confidence, poise, and leadership. What's more, Steve Cohen will show you: How to Create a Magic Moment. Capturing people's imaginations and attention so they listen carefully to every word you say. How to Command a Room. Showing everyone in the room that you are speaking right to them, making them all feel unique—and completely focused on you. How to Read People. Learning to sense what people are feeling and thinking as you speak, what they want from you, and how to make them feel like they are getting it. Misdirection. The most important trick in all of magic—getting inside people's heads, and directing what they are thinking at every minute. When you strip away the sleight of hand tricks, magicians are essentially masters of attracting and holding attention and impressing audiences, exactly the psychological secrets you need to be successful in life and business.

Download or read book The Best Kind of People written by Zoe Whittall and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2016-08-27 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a national bestseller, Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People is a stunning tour de force about the unravelling of an all-American family. George Woodbury, an affable teacher and beloved husband and father, is arrested for sexual impropriety at a prestigious prep school. His wife, Joan, vaults between denial and rage as the community she loved turns on her. Their daughter, Sadie, a popular over-achieving high school senior, becomes a social pariah. Their son, Andrew, assists in his father’s defense, while wrestling with his own unhappy memories of his teen years. A local author tries to exploit their story, while an unlikely men’s rights activist attempts to get Sadie onside their cause. With George locked up, how do the members of his family pick up the pieces and keep living their lives? How do they defend someone they love while wrestling with the possibility of his guilt? With exquisite emotional precision, award-winning author Zoe Whittall explores issues of loyalty, truth, and the meaning of happiness through the lens of an all-American family on the brink of collapse.

Download or read book The Summer That Melted Everything written by Tiffany McDaniel and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The devil comes to Ohio in Tiffany McDaniel's breathtaking and heartbreaking literary debut novel, The Summer That Melted Everything. *Winner of The Guardian's 2016 "Not the Booker" Prize and the Ohioana Readers' Choice Award *Goodreads Choice Award nominee for "Best Fiction" and "Best Debut" Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984: the year a heat wave scorched Breathed, Ohio. The year he became friends with the devil. Sal seems to appear out of nowhere - a bruised and tattered thirteen-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home where he's welcomed into the Bliss family, assuming he's a runaway from a nearby farm town. When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. Murmurs follow him and tensions rise, along with the temperatures as an unbearable heat wave rolls into town right along with him. As strange accidents start to occur, riled by the feverish heat, some in the town start to believe that Sal is exactly who he claims to be. While the Bliss family wrestles with their own personal demons, a fanatic drives the town to the brink of a catastrophe that will change this sleepy Ohio backwater forever.

Download or read book Breakpoint and Beyond written by George T. Ainsworth-Land and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1993-02-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BUS000000

Download or read book The Oxford Companion to Philosophy written by Ted Honderich and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 1050 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most authoritative and engaging philosophical reference work in English. It gives clear and reliable guidance to all areas of philosophy and to the ideas of all notable philosophers from antiquity to the present day. The scope of the volume is not limited to English-languagephilosophy: it surveys the foremost philosophy from all parts of the world. A distinguished international assembly of more than two hundred contributors provide almost 2,000 alphabetically arranged entries which are not only instructive but also entertaining: they combine learning, lucidity, elegance, and wit. There are more than fifty extended entries of 3,000 words on themain areas of philosophy and the great philosophers: these include essays by Alasdair MacIntyre on the history of moral philosophy, Paul Feyerabend on the history of the philosophy of science, Jaegwon Kim on problems of the philosophy of mind, Richard Swinburne on problems of the philosophy ofreligion, David Charles on Aristotle, Peter Singer on Hegel, Anthony Kenny on Frege, and Anthony Quinton on philosophy itself. Short entries deal with key concepts (for instance, personal identity, time) doctrines (utilitarianism, holism), problems (the mind-body problem, the meaning of life), schools of thought (Marxist philosophy, the Vienna Circle), and practical issues (abortion, vegetarianism). Individual thinkerspast (Pythagoras, Confucius, Galileo, Goethe, Burke, Santayana, de Beauvoir, Radhakrishnan) and present (over 150 contemporary figures, such as Chomsky, Derrida, and Popper) are profiled, and eighty of them are depicted in black-and-white portraits. Interspersed throughout are short explanations ofparticular philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading. A chronological chart of the history of philosophy is located at theend of the book, together with fourteen diagrams showing the structure of philosophy and the relations between its subjects and doctrines. This book will be an indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment for anyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding.

Download or read book The different aspects of islamic culture written by UNESCO and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 926 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication examines art, the human sciences, science, philosophy, mysticism, language and literature. For this task, UNESCO has chosen scholars and experts from all over the world who belong to widely divergent cultural and religious backgrounds.--Publisher's description.

Download or read book Loudermilk written by Lucy Ives and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, is "hilarious . . . a riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend" (The Washington Post). It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life. Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.

Download or read book Blood Pages written by George Bilgere and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blood Pages George Bilgere continues his exploration of the joys and absurdities of being middle-aged and middle-class in the Midwest. OK, maybe he’s a bit beyond middle-aged at this point, and his rueful awareness of this makes these poems even more darkly hilarious, more deeply aware of the feckless and baffling times our nation has stumbled into. And the fact that Bilgere, relatively late in life, is now the father of two young boys brings a fresh sense of urgency to his work. Blood Pages is a guidebook to the fears, foibles, and beauties of our lovely old country as it makes its blundering, tentative way into the new century.

Download or read book Truth Lies and Mr Grey written by Shelly Ellis and published by Dafina. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three women scorned, one wealthy, vengeful bigamist--and killer bad news no one saw coming. In Shelly Ellis’ shocking follow-up to The Three Mrs. Greys, a trio of betrayed wives finds that no one can be trusted— definitely not their wealthy, vengeful bigamist husband, and maybe not even themselves… Diamond. Noelle. Vanessa. As Cyrus Grey recovers from a near-fatal shooting, the women who each thought they were his only wife are fighting hard to make new dreams—even if it means going one dangerous step too far… On trial for Cyrus’s shooting, Diamond is determined to clear her name—and get back the husband she still loves. But uncovering the truth will reveal more secrets than she ever imagined. And unexpected desire is bringing them all too close to home… Beautiful Noelle has found happiness with new love Tariq. But Cyrus’ scheming confronts her with an unthinkable conspiracy—and an impossible choice to save all she hopes for… As seemingly sweet suburban wife Vanessa helps Cyrus recover, she's about to finish him off for good—and keep the expensive lifestyle she earned. But her manipulations will push her up against two relentless—and all-too-intimate—enemies… Now with lethal agendas clashing, passions high, and everyone's future on the line, which rules will each woman break to finally end the past—and who will survive to secure everything?

Download or read book Savor Eternity One Moment at a Time written by Alfred LaMotte and published by . This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for "SAVOR ETERNITY" Alfred K. LaMotte is truly the rarest kind of alchemist. With each poem in this exquisite collection, he weaves ordinary words into pure gold, inducting the reader into a direct experience of the sublime ineffability of life itself. Sourced from the depths of his own awakened heart, his words will pierce straight through to your own tender heart, igniting and awakening you. LaMotte stands with Rilke, Rumi, and Hafiz in beckoning our souls to awaken. Let each poem be a mystery that you discover and savor as you would a lover. TINA M. BENSON, international bestselling author of " A Women Unto Herself: A Different Kind of Love Story" The poetry of Alfred K. LaMotte speaks to my soul of long lost love, and redeems my heart from a fall that I cannot even remember. Somehow he makes the total mystery of existence feel all right. Susanne Marie, meditation guide and founder of Transformation Through Presence TM Inside this poetry is the deep perfume of God, a vast pool of light and pure generosity. Here are bees, honey, and simplicity of Being. That is why every time we read his poetry, we are nourished, uplifted, and we never tire of reading them again and again. Guthema Roba, poet, author of "Please Come Home " and "Wake Up and Roar" Alfred K. LaMotte's writing simply and actively opens the heart, inspiring and enlightening without ever a heavy-handed word of preaching or lecture. In pure authenticity and elegant vulnerability, he writes with the clear heart of a true meditation teacher, and shows us the way Dian Lang, Author of "Opening to Meditation," Huffington Post columnist, and director of LifeWorks Center for Growth in Los Angeles TM. This is a stunning and prophetic book, courageous in its commitment to the living milk of the Mother, disturbing our complacency and our stagnant idealization of who She is or how She must appear. These poems joyously report that here, and right here, is where we taste the cardinal fulfillment of our essential nature. The Feminine, as a psychic force, reaches far beyond biological sex, and thus cannot be wholly claimed by the female voice (tempting as this might be after centuries of inequality and abuse). In his new book, Alfred K. LaMotte speaks from a breadth and wholeness that is the undeniable sign of Her presence. These poems help us see that the creaturely and the divine are not eternally set apart: they can be recognized as a single gesture of invitation to a much finer, more generous participation in the real. Britt Posmer, painter, performance artist and poet, author of "The Angel and the Heretic"

Download or read book Wounded Bud written by Alfred LaMotte and published by . This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wounded Bud - Poems for Meditation by Alfred K. LaMotte The poet Shelley wrote: "Every original language near to its source is the chaos of a cyclic poem... A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one." Ancient cultures recognized that the mystery of creation is the mystery of "original language." So John's Gospel declares, "In the beginning was the Word." And India's Mandukya Upanishad says, "All that ever was, is, or will be is created through the syllable Om." The poems in this volume reflect this ancient science of mantra. "Man" is the Sanskrit root of the English "mind" and "tra" of our suffix "tron," meaning vehicle. A mantra is a vehicle to carry the mind back to the source of creation, divine silence. Here in the heart, love awakens. Fred LaMotte conceives language in this ancient tradition, where poetry is a means of taking us home, taking us Om. Many of these poems also reflect the tradition of the mystical marriage. Poets of Eastern and Western religions understood the intimate play of soul and spirit as the whisperings of Lover and Beloved. They created a common poetic iconography, a love-language both sensuous and mystical, which we find in Sufi poets like Hafiz, Hindu poets like Mirabai, the Biblical Song of Songs, the Medieval troubadours, and the parables of Jesus. Mystical poetry can dis- solve religious conflict. Fred LaMotte offers us a revival of atavistic poetics: poetry as meditation, poetry as devotion, or Bhakti, poetry as love-song in the Bridal Chamber of the heart. "In the lover's heart is a lute which plays the melody of longing." Rumi