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In Flesh and Fabric, Jeffrey F. Hamburger explores the historical context and technique of a largely overlooked panel by Pietro Lorenzetti. Through its unparalleled allegorical presentation of the Crucifixion, this panel grants precedence to Clare of Assisi over Francis, founder of the Franciscan Order.

In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene, Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Greene was the first director of the Morgan Library, and her letters illuminate a life writ large.

From renowned legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, a concise, case-by-case guide to resolving free-speech dilemmas at colleges and universities.Free speech is indispensable on college campuses: allowing varied views and frank exchanges of opinion is a core component of the educational enterprise and the pursuit of truth. But free speech does not mean a free-for-all. The First Amendment prohibits "abridging the freedom of speech," yet laws against perjury or bribery, for example, are still constitutional. In the same way, valuing freedom of speech does not stop a university from regulating speech when doing so is necessary for its educational mission. So where is the dividing line? How can we distinguish reasonable restrictions from impermissible infringement?In this pragmatic, no-nonsense explainer, Cass Sunstein takes us through a wide range of scenarios involving students, professors, and administrators. He discusses why it's consistent with the First Amendment to punish students who shout down a speaker, but not those who chant offensive slogans; why a professor cannot be fired for writing a politically charged op-ed, yet a university might legitimately consider an applicant's political views when deciding whether to hire her. He explains why private universities are not legally bound by the First Amendment yet should, in most cases, look to follow it. And he addresses the thorny question of whether a university should officially take sides on public issues or deliberately keep the institution outside the fray.At a time when universities are assailed on free-speech grounds from both left and right, Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide is an indispensable resource for cutting through the noise and understanding the key issues animating the debates.

No detailed description available for "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process".

The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive "Caucasian" for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies. In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women's letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a "diplomacy of the heart" that led them to question why their countries were so divided. Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other's world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents. A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of "enemy" and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.

History is not one story, but many. In Rethinking Japan's Modernity, M. William Steele takes a new look at the people, places, and events associated with Japan's engagement with modernity, starting with American Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival in Japan in 1853. In many cases, this new look derives from visual sources, such as popular broadsheets, satirical cartoons, ukiyo-e and other woodblock prints, postcards, and photographs. The book illustrates the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of people who experienced the unfolding of modern Japan. It focuses both on the experiences of people living the events "at that time" and on the reflections of others looking back. Also included are three new translations--two of them by Japan's pioneer Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi, and another by Mantei Ōga--parodying Fukuzawa's monumental work advocating Western learning. These and other stories show how Japanese views of modernity evolved over time. Each chapter is prefaced with a short introduction to the topic covered and historiographical approach taken, allowing each to stand alone as well as support the overall goal of the work--to inform and challenge our understanding of the links between Japan's past, present, and future.

A contemporary edition and translation of one of the great monuments of Old English literary and religious culture. The homilies of the monk Ælfric, written in the last decade of the tenth century, offer some of the most important prose writing in Old English. They convey mainstream Christian thought at the turn of the millennium, a distillation of the spiritual inheritance of the English Church before the Norman Conquest and during a time of monastic reform. The homilies cover a broad range of topics, from biblical exegesis to saints' lives to general Christian history, with a strong focus on the Gospel reading at Mass, explained in language that laypeople could understand. Ælfric is famous for his lucid prose, which he later developed into a rhythmical and alliterative style that has often been likened to verse. In his first series of Catholic Homilies, Ælfric drew on the works of Church Fathers such as Augustine, Gregory, and Bede to create forty sermons for use throughout the church year. This is the first complete translation of the Catholic Homilies since 1844, presented alongside the newly edited Old English text.

Facing a transformed socio-political landscape after the An Lushan Rebellion (756-763), Tang dynasty elites questioned inherited understandings of tradition and anxiously reflected on their relations to both recent and ancient pasts. Du Fu (712-770), widely considered China's greatest poet, presciently addressed these concerns in his late work on memory and the means by which the past survives. In Elegies for Empire, Gregory Patterson maps out a poetics of memory in Du Fu's poems from his prolific period of residence in Kuizhou, a remote border town in the Yangzi River Three Gorges. Patterson argues that, for Du Fu, memory held the promise of rebuilding frameworks of belonging under conditions of displacement and dynastic crisis. Remembering also led the poet to think through the material underpinnings on which cultural transmission depends; therefore, these late poems are distinguished by a highly creative, often melancholy engagement with the forms and media that preserve memory, such as monuments, paintings, and poetry. Elegies for Empire elucidates the vital roles of place, memory, and media in poems that are among the most influential in the Chinese literary tradition.

"Wise and illuminating...Merrill's treatment of the rise of Chevron, and its various twists and turns over the decades, is keenly insightful." --Cass R. Sunstein, New York Review of Books "Merrill is one of the brightest and best scholars of administrative law in his generation. This book...is must-reading for any citizen who has an interest in the constitutionality of the administrative state." --Steven G. Calabresi, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law "A model of how to conduct rigorous, level-headed, and fair-minded analysis of a subject that has generated enormous legal controversy. There is no more judicious mind among American legal scholars than Thomas Merrill's."--Nicholas Parrillo, Yale Law School "A must-read for practicing or prospective administrative lawyers. They, as well as a broader audience, will find much good sense in the author's judicious treatment of perennial questions of lawful government."--Michael S. Greve, Claremont Review of Books The Constitution makes Congress the principal federal lawmaker. But for a variety of reasons, including partisan gridlock, Congress increasingly fails to keep up with the challenges facing our society. Power has shifted to the executive branch agencies that interpret laws and to the courts that review their interpretations. Since the Supreme Court's 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, this judicial review has been highly deferential: courts must uphold agency interpretations of unclear laws so long as these are "reasonable." But the Chevron doctrine faces backlash from constitutional scholars and, now, from Supreme Court justices who insist that courts, not administrative agencies, have the authority to say what the law is. Critics of the administrative state charge that Chevron deference enables unaccountable bureaucratic power. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Merrill reviews the history and consequences of the Chevron doctrine and suggests a way forward.

A surprising history of interfaith collaboration in the Roman Ghetto, where for three centuries Jewish and Christian butchers worked together to provision the city despite the proscriptions of Church law. For Rome's Jewish population, confined to a ghetto between 1555 and 1870, efforts to secure kosher meat were fraught with challenges. The city's papal authorities viewed kashrut--the Jewish dietary laws--with suspicion, and it was widely believed that kosher meat would contaminate any Christian who consumed it. Supplying kosher provisions entailed circumventing canon law and the institutions that regulated the butchering and sale of meat throughout the city. Kenneth Stow finds that Jewish butchers collaborated extensively with their Christian counterparts to ensure a supply of kosher meat, regardless of the laws that prohibited such interactions. Jewish butchers sold nonkosher portions of slaughtered animals daily to Christians outside the ghetto, which in turn ensured the affordability of kosher meat. At the same time, Christian butchers also found it profitable to work with Jews, as this enabled them to sell good meat otherwise unavailable at attractive prices. These relationships could be warm and almost intimate, but they could also be rife with anger, deception, and even litigation. Nonetheless, without this close cooperation--and the willingness of authorities to turn a blind eye to it--meat-eating in the ghetto would have been nearly impossible. Only the rise of the secular state in the late nineteenth century brought fundamental change, putting an end to canon law and allowing the kosher meat market to flourish. A rich social history of food in early modern Rome, Feeding the Eternal City is also a compelling narrative of Jewish life and religious acculturation in the capital of Catholicism.

Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History S-USIH Book Award, Society for U.S. Intellectual History Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians "A fascinating book...Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and 'heathen' was the central divide in American life."--Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker "Offers a dazzling range of examples to substantiate its thesis. Rare is the reader who could dip into it without becoming much better informed on a great many topics historical, literary, and religious. So many of Gin Lum's examples are enlightening and informative in their own right."--Philip Jenkins, Christian Century "Brilliant...Gin Lum's writing style is nuanced, clear, detailed yet expansive, and accessible, which will make the book a fit for both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Any scholar of American history should have a copy." --Emily Suzanne Clark, S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual History In this sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race. Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, leading some to imagine that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans' sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth.

Frederic W. Ness Book Award, American Association of Colleges and Universities A Forbes Best Higher Education Book "A practical guide to more effective and engaged college teaching."--Forbes "Everyone who teaches (or hopes to teach) college will find this book a provocative and stimulating source of ideas about how to make our classrooms more equitable, participatory and interactive."--Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed "A pedagogical treasure trove...Required reading for educators who aspire to follow in the footsteps of our predecessors by teaching students not only to navigate the world, but to change it."--Danica Savonick, Public Books "A guidebook and a DIY manifesto for change in college teaching...This book can help any instructor striving for just and excellent teaching."--Margaret Fuller Society The New College Classroom helps instructors in all disciplines create an environment that is truly conducive to learning. Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis, two of the world's foremost innovators in higher education, translate cutting-edge research in learning science and pedagogy into ready-to-use strategies to incorporate into any course. These empirically driven, classroom-tested techniques of active learning--from the participatory syllabus and ungrading to grab-and-go activities for every day of the term--have achieved impressive results at community colleges and research universities, on campus, online, and in hybrid settings. Extensive evidence shows that active learning tools are more effective than conventional methods of instruction. Davidson and Katopodis provide detailed case studies of educators successfully applying active learning techniques in their courses every day, ensuring that their students are better prepared for the world after college.

"A quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn't clear how culturalists--especially the anti-Marxist ones--can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is."--Chris Wright, CounterPunch "Chibber...has developed a sophisticated, elegant, and readable defense of the sociological significance of class structure in understanding and addressing the key problems inherent in capitalism."--Choice "[A] clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we're to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms."--Jacobin Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, theorists argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture--that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival. Chibber accommodates the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework, showing how one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. He vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain, while also explaining that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors. The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called "the dull compulsion of economic relations."

"Lively in style and backed by solid, unobtrusive scholarship...In her call for responsibility in borrowing, Liz Bucar singles out for criticism forms of exploitation close to her own identity as privileged and religiously unaffiliated." --Jonathan Benthall, Times Literary Supplement "So finely written, so intelligent and fair, and laced with such surprising discoveries that it deserves a reader's full attention...As the act of walking a religious pilgrimage does invite greater self-awareness...Stealing My Religion is now an essential part of that worthy endeavor." --Kurt Caswell, Los Angeles Review of Books "With interpretive subtlety and ethical vision, Liz Bucar explores the moral risk of intercultural theft. Stealing My Religion is a powerful intervention by a leading scholar of religion into the illiberal results of everyday religious exploitation. Highly recommended." --Kathryn Lofton, author of Consuming Religion Liz Bucar unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, economic, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from another's religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Bucar sees religion as an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because faiths overlap and imitate each other and because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. Indeed, if we are to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are. Stealing My Religion guides us through three revealing case studies--the hijab as a feminist signal of Muslim allyship, a study abroad "pilgrimage" on the Camino de Santiago, and the commodification of yoga in the West. We see why the Vatican can't grant Rihanna permission to dress up as the pope, yet it's still okay to roll out our yoga mats. Reflecting on her own missteps, Bucar comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isn't to borrow less but to borrow more--to become deeply invested in learning the roots and diverse meanings of our enthusiasms.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Charming and brilliant." --Times Literary Supplement "Provocative, stimulating, wise―the book that our success-obsessed age needs to read."―Tom Holland "Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next...I was absorbed by Bradatan's book even--or especially--when I felt uncomfortable with its implications." --Jennifer Szalai, New York Times "Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life's inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure--and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality." --Michael S. Roth, Washington Post "Bradatan writes with the same daring, the same interpretive anger that made his subjects notorious in their own day for choosing failure over what their respective worlds counted as success. A gripping read, start to finish." ―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life's challenges. In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but positively transformative.

The first complete English translation of a controversial Renaissance debate centering moral questions on power and leadership. Poggio Bracciolini was a prominent scholar-official of the early Renaissance and a leading representative of Florentine humanism. He was employed as a secretary to seven popes and ended his career as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence. On Leaders and Tyrants contains texts, the majority by Poggio, relating to a controversy on the relative merits of the lives and deeds of Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar. The debate addressed the nature of tyranny and military glory, as well as the qualities necessary for republican leaders, such as Stoic virtue, lawfulness, and good citizenship. Poggio's primary opponent was the educator Guarino of Verona, a humanist in the service of the duke of Ferrara. The psychology of power, the demands placed on public servants, and the dividing line between leadership and tyranny are as topical today as they were when Poggio wrote. This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin texts and the first complete translation of the controversy into English.

A definitive interpretation of academic freedom as a First Amendment right, drawing on a comprehensive survey of legal cases. Is academic freedom a First Amendment right? Many think so, yet its relationship to free speech as guaranteed by the Constitution is anything but straightforward. David Rabban examines the extensive case law addressing academic freedom and free speech at American universities, developing a robust theory of academic freedom as a distinctive subset of First Amendment law. In subsuming academic freedom under the First Amendment, Rabban emphasizes the societal value of the contribution to knowledge made by the expert speech of professors, the classic justification for academic freedom in the influential 1915 Declaration of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Any indication that professors might be disciplined because people without academic training disagree with their scholarly views would undermine confidence in the integrity of their work and therefore their ability to perform this vital function on behalf of the public. Rabban argues that academic freedom fosters two central First Amendment values recognized by courts in a wide range of contexts: the production and dissemination of knowledge and the contribution of free expression to democratic citizenship. The First Amendment right of academic freedom applies most directly to professors, but it also plausibly extends to the educational decisions of universities and to students' learning interests. More broadly, this vision of academic freedom can guide in developing additional distinctive First Amendment rights to protect the expert expression of journalists, librarians, museum curators, and other professionals. At a time when academic freedom is under attack from many directions, Academic Freedom proposes a theoretically satisfying and practically useful guide to its meaning as a First Amendment right.

An authoritative new Greek edition and English translation of the life of a notable Byzantine monastic leader. Saint Peter of Atroa (773-837 CE) was a Byzantine monastic leader, remembered primarily as cofounder and abbot of the influential monastery of Saint Zachariah at Atroa, below the holy mountain of Olympos in Bithynia. Peter sought to live in tranquility and solitude, traveling to the various monasteries he established in northwestern Asia Minor and occasionally joining other notable monastic figures. However, his resistance to the Iconoclast policies of imperial regimes in Constantinople during the first half of the ninth century led to his persecution and the temporary dispersal of his communities. Although he was evidently regarded with suspicion by some of his contemporaries, he gained a reputation as a miracle worker and his tomb became the site of a healing cult in the years after his death. The Life of Saint Peter of Atroa was written by the saint's disciple Sabas, also the biographer for Peter's contemporary and friend Saint Ioannikios, and it survives in two manuscript versions. This volume represents an entirely new edition of the Greek text, establishing the version previously regarded as secondary as the more important of the two, and making the Life accessible to English readers for the first time.

A new interpretation of the constitutional law of foreign affairs, as it has been developed throughout its history by presidents and by Congress. In the more than 230 years since the Constitution took effect, the constitutional law governing the conduct of foreign affairs has evolved significantly. But that evolution did not come through formal amendments or Supreme Court rulings. Rather, the law has been defined by the practices of Congress and the executive branch, also known as "historical gloss." Curtis A. Bradley documents this process in action. He shows that expansions in presidential power over foreign affairs have often been justified by reference to historical gloss, but that Congress has not merely stepped aside. Belying conventional accounts of the "imperial presidency" in foreign affairs, Congress has also benefited from gloss, claiming powers for itself in the international arena not clearly addressed in the constitutional text and disrupting claims of exclusive presidential authority. Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs proposes a constitutional theory that can make sense of these legal changes. In contrast, originalist theories of constitutional interpretation often ignore influential post-Founding developments, while nonoriginalist theories tend to focus on judicial decisions rather than the actions and reasoning of Congress and the executive branch. Moreover, the constitutional theories that do focus on practice have typically emphasized changes at particular moments in time. What we see in the constitutional law of foreign affairs, however, is the long-term accumulation of nonjudicial precedents that is characteristic of historical gloss. With gloss confirmed as a prime mover in the development of foreign affairs law, we can begin to recognize its broader status as an important and longstanding form of constitutional reasoning.

The definitive story of a top Chinese politician's ill-fated quest to reform the Communist Party. When Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, throngs of mourners converged on the Martyrs' Monument in Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. Following Hu's 1987 ouster by party elders, Chinese propaganda officials had sought to tarnish his reputation and dim his memory, yet his death galvanized the nascent pro-democracy student movement, setting off the dramatic demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre. The Conscience of the Party is the comprehensive, authoritative biography of the Chinese Communist Party's most avid reformer and its general secretary for a key stretch of the 1980s. A supremely intelligent leader with an exceptional populist touch, Hu Yaobang was tapped early by Mao Zedong as a capable party hand. But Hu's principled ideas made him powerful enemies, and during the Cultural Revolution he was purged, brutally beaten, and consigned to forced labor. After Mao's death, Hu rose again as an ally of Deng Xiaoping, eventually securing the party's top position. In that role, he pioneered many of the economic reforms subsequently attributed to Deng. But Hu also pursued political reforms with equal vigor, pushing for more freedom of expression, the end of lifetime tenure for CCP leaders, and the dismantling of Mao's personality cult. Alarmed by Hu's growing popularity and increasingly radical agenda, Deng had him purged again in 1987. Historian and former intelligence analyst Robert L. Suettinger meticulously reconstructs Hu's life, providing the kind of eye-opening account that remains impossible in China under state censorship. Hu Yaobang, a decent man operating in a system that did not always reward decency, suffered for his principles but inspired millions in the process.

A visionary reexamination of the value of privacy in today's hypermediated world--not just as a political right but as the key to a life worth living. The parts of our lives that are not being surveilled and turned into data diminish each day. We are able to configure privacy settings on our devices and social media platforms, but we know our efforts pale in comparison to the scale of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation. In our hyperconnected era, many have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to live a private life, or whether it is no longer worth fighting for. The Right to Oblivion argues incisively and persuasively that we still can and should strive for privacy, though for different reasons than we might think. Recent years have seen heated debate in the realm of law and technology about why privacy matters, often focusing on how personal data breaches amount to violations of individual freedom. Yet as Lowry Pressly shows, the very terms of this debate have undermined our understanding of privacy's real value. In a novel philosophical account, Pressly insists that privacy isn't simply a right to be protected but a tool for making life meaningful. Privacy deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Without privacy, the world would grow shallow, lonely, and inhospitable. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, and a range of contemporary artists, Pressly shows why we all need a refuge from the world: not a place to hide, but a psychic space beyond the confines of a digital world in which the individual is treated as mere data.

Common Sense reveals a political ideal so fundamental to American politics that we are unaware of its power and its myriad uses. Sophia Rosenfeld shows how common sense--the wisdom of ordinary people, self-evident truths--has been used to justify all political extremes, with a history that is anything but commonsensical.

This book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in. In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word copying permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, Marcus Boon undertakes an examination of what this word means historically, culturally, philosophically and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today. Drawing on contemporary art, music and film, the history of aesthetics, critical theory, and Buddhist philosophy and practice, "In Praise of Copying" seeks to show how and why copying works, what the sources of its power are, and the political stakes of renegotiating the way we value copying in the age of globalization.

This data-rich sociological study uses everything from census figures to Who's Who to analyze how, over 125 years, the British elite have used status, elite education, and powerful social networks to shape politics and cultural values. But what happens when elites begin to change-in what they look like, value, and how they position themselves?

Henry James rebelled against the tyranny and banality of plots. Believing a life to have many potential paths and a self to hold many destinies, he hung the evocative shadow of what might have been over much of what he wrote. Yet James also realized that no life can be lived - and no story written - except by submission to some outcome. In this study of James's work, Millicent Bell explores this oscillation between hope and fatalism, indeterminacy and form, and uncertainty and meaning. In the process Bell provides fresh insight into how we read and interpret fiction.

We generally suppose that it is our right to freedom that allows us to make the choices that shape our lives. The right to have an abortion is called "freedom of choice" because, it is said, a woman should be free to choose between giving birth and not doing so. Freedom of speech protects us whether we want to salute the flag or burn it. There is a correlative principle: one choice is as good as another. Freedom is not a right that makes moral judgments. It lets us do what we want. John Garvey disputes both propositions. We should understand freedom, he maintains, as a right to act, not a right to choose; and furthermore, we should view freedom as a right to engage in actions that are good and valuable. This may seem obvious, but it inverts a central principle of liberalism - the idea that the right is prior to the good. Thus friendship is a good thing; and one reason the Constitution protects freedom of association is that it gives us the space to form friendships. This book casts doubt on the idea that freedoms are bilateral rights that allow us to make contradictory choices: to speak or remain silent, to believe in God or to disbelieve, to abort or to give birth to a child. Garvey argues that the goodness of childbearing does not entail the goodness of abortion; and if freedom follows from the good, then freedom to do the first does not entail freedom to do the second. Each action must have its own justification. Garvey holds that if the law is to protect freedoms it is permissible - indeed, it is necessary - to make judgments about the goodness and badness of actions.

Pairs is a student-led journal at Harvard University Graduate School of Design dedicated to design conversations. Pairs 04 features Danielle Auburt, Melanie Boehi, Fernanda Canales, Theaster Gates, Ryan W. Kennihan, Yasmeen Lari, Maeling Lokko, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Sharon Mattern, Jeffrey Shaw, Kate Wagner, and others.

"Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism's usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism--another of Christianity's gifts to the West"--Jacket.