From 9/11 to COVID-19, the twenty-first century looks increasingly dystopian—and so do its television shows. Long-form science fiction narratives take one step further the fears of today: liberal democracy in crisis, growing economic precarity, the threat of terrorism, and omnipresent corporate control. At the same time, many of these shows attempt to visualize alternatives, using dystopian extrapolations to spotlight the possibility of building a better world. Programming the Future examines how recent speculative television takes on the contradictions of the neoliberal order. Sherryl Vint and Jonathan Alexander consider a range of popular SF narratives of the last two decades, including Battlestar Galactica, Watchmen, Colony, The Man in the High Castle, The Expanse, and Mr. Robot. They argue that science fiction television foregrounds governance as part of explaining the novel institutions and norms of its imagined futures. In so doing, SF shows allegorize and critique contemporary social, political, and economic developments, helping audiences resist the naturalization of the status quo. Vint and Alexander also draw on queer theory to explore the representation of family structures and their relationship to larger social structures. Recasting both dystopian and utopian narratives, Programming the Future shows how depictions of alternative-world political struggles speak to urgent real-world issues of identity, belonging, and social and political change.
An unvarnished accounting of one man's struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity. In this unconventional memoir, Jonathan Alexander addresses wry and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years--1989, 1993, and 1996--Dear Queer Self follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton, and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humor and wit afforded by hindsight, Alexander relives his closeted college years, his experiments with his sexuality in graduate school, his first marriage to a woman, and his budding career as a college professor. As he moves from tortured self-denial to hard-won self-acceptance, the author confronts the deeply uncomfortable ways he is implicated in his own story. More than just a coming-out narrative, Dear Queer Self is both an intimate psychological exploration and a cultural examination--a meshing of inner and outer realities and a personal reckoning with how we sometimes torture the truth to make a life. It is also a love letter, an homage to a decade of rapid change, and a playlist of the sounds, sights, and feelings of a difficult, but ultimately transformative, time.
In this provocative book, Jonathan Alexander interweaves personal narrative and cultural analyses to explore what it means to be a creep. Calling this work a critical memoir, he draws on his own experiences growing up gay in the deep south, while also interrogating examples from literature and popular film and media, to approach the figure of the creep with some sympathy. Ranging widely over contemporary culture, especially the ever-creeping presence of nearly ubiquitous surveillance, Alexander confesses his own creepiness while also explaining to us what being creepy can show us in turn about our culture. He also resurrects some famous "creeps" from the past, such as J.R. Ackerley, to explore what makes a creep creepy, and how even the best of us succumb at times to being creeps
How can you help your software team improve? This concise book introduces codermetrics, a clear and objective way to identify, analyze, and discuss the successes and failures of software engineers—not as part of a performance review, but as a way to make the team a more cohesive and productive unit. Experienced team builder Jonathan Alexander explains how codermetrics helps teams understand exactly what occurred during a project, and enables each coder to focus on specific improvements. Alexander presents a variety of simple and complex codermetrics, and teaches you how to create your own. Learn how codermetrics changes long-held assumptions and improves team dynamics Get recommendations for integrating codermetrics into existing processes Ask the right questions to determine the type of data you need to collect Use metrics to measure individual coder skills and a team’s effectiveness over time Identify the contributions each coder makes to the team Analyze the response to your software and its features—and verify that you're meeting team and organizational goals Build better teams, using codermetrics to make personnel adjustments and additions
Writing Youth: Young Adult Fiction as Literacy Sponsorship shows how many young adult novels model for young people ways to manage the various media tools that surround them. Jonathan Alexander examines not only young adult texts and their media ecologies but also young people’s multiliterate media making in response to their favorite texts and stories. As such, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned about young people’s literacies and the relationship between literacy development and the culture industries.
A graphic novel biography of the American legend who inspired the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton was one of the most influential figures in United States history—he fought in the Revolutionary War, helped develop the Constitution, and as the first Secretary of the Treasury established landmark economic policy that we still use today. Cut down by a bullet from political rival Aaron Burr, Hamilton has since been immortalized alongside other Founding Fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—his likeness even appears on the ten-dollar bill. In this fully-illustrated and impeccably researched graphic novel-style history, author Jonathan Hennessey and comic book illustrator Justin Greenwood bring Alexander Hamilton’s world to life, telling the story of this improbable hero who helped shape the United States of America.
In the summer of 1928, an eleven-year-old American-born son of Greek immigrants travels with his parents and siblings to Greece to visit their family village. There, he witnesses the brutal murder of his father and grandfather by Albanian bandits who were directed out of revenge by "the man with a hole in his face." The young boy, his distraught mother, and two of his siblings return to the United States a year later, leaving behind one of his brothers in the hands of a wealthy uncle and aunt who turn out to be abusive and neglectful. The younger brother runs away and jumps a ship as a stowaway, where he is taken in by an empathetic crew who helps him reunite with his family abroad. This is the true story of the author's ancestors. He walks you through the process from start to finish of what it was like to be an immigrant in the early 1900s and chronicles the banditry that plagued the countryside of Greece for decades. It is a story of personal tragedy, revenge, and justice. But most of all, it is a story of community and survival.
Who were the medieval illuminators? How were their hand-produced books illustrated and decorated? In this beautiful book Jonathan Alexander presents a survey of manuscript illumination throughout Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. He discusses the social and historical context of the illuminators' lives, considers their methods of work, and presents a series of case studies to show the range and nature of the visual sources and the ways in which they were adapted, copied, or created anew. Alexander explains that in the early period, Christian monasteries and churches were the main centers for the copying of manuscripts, and so the majority of illuminators were monks working in and for their own monasteries. From the eleventh century, lay scribes and illuminators became increasingly numerous, and by the thirteenth century, professional illuminators dominated the field. During this later period, illuminators were able to travel in search of work and to acquire new ideas, they joined guilds with scribes or with artists in the cities, and their ranks included nuns and secular women. Work was regularly collaborative, and the craft was learned through an apprenticeship system. Alexander carefully analyzes surviving manuscripts and medieval treatises in order to explain the complex and time-consuming technical processes of illumination - its materials, methods, tools, choice of illustration, and execution. From rare surviving contracts, he deduces the preoccupation of patrons with materials and schedules. Illustrating his discussion with examples chosen from religious and secular manuscripts made all over Europe, Alexander recreates the astonishing variety and creativity ofmedieval illumination. His book will be a standard reference for years to come.
What happens when the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand -- and live with -- definitive feelings of having been abused when the origin of those feelings won't adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience? In Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, Jonathan Alexander meditates on how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he'd been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” -- a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men. Story though it was, Alexander maintains that some form of abuse did occur. In writing that is at turns reflective, analytic, and hallucinatory, Alexander traces what it means to suffer homophobic abuse when such is diffused across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics -- as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in young Alexander's life. Along the way, Alexander reflects on Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, cruising, teaching young adult fiction about rape, and a host of other oddly but intimately related topics.
The title says it all, this is a guide book of how not write poetry through example. It is for those who see the world peripherally and take note of the incongruous. From skinny calved hipsters to World War 2 and boy bands. This is poetry for the brilliant, the lazy, the unenlightened or maybe it is just for those who tire of poetry. It is tiring isn't it? Get out your pillows and enjoy!
After shaking up writing classrooms at more than 450 colleges and universities, Understanding Rhetoric, the comic-style guide to writing that instructors have told us gets "nothing but positive responses from students," has returned for a second edition! Combining the composition know-how of Liz Losh and Jonathan Alexander with the comic-art credibility of Kevin Cannon (Far Arden, Crater XV) and Zander Cannon (Heck, Kaijumax), Understanding Rhetoric encourages deep engagement with core concepts of writing and rhetoric, as teachers and students alike have told us. With a new chapter on collaboration, unique coverage of writerly identity, and extensive discussions of rhetoric, reading, argument, research, revision, and presenting work to audiences, the one and only composition comic covers what students need to know--and does so with fun and flair. A new "Walk the Talk" feature in each chapter helps students see how to put concepts to use in their own reading and writing. And the detailed instructor's manual will help both novice and experienced instructors plan a course around Understanding Rhetoric.
These poems are the best poems from Jonathan Holden's first seven books, four of which have won significant national competitions: Design for a House (The Devins Award, 1972), Leverage (The AWP Award Series, 1982), The Names of the Rapids (The Juniper Prize, 1985), and The Sublime (The Vassar Miller Prize, 1995). Holden's command of language is staggering, and his range of subjects is extensive. He writes about sex, mathematics, nationalism, propaganda, baseball, and blackmail with an emotional honesty that pushes his observations in surprising directions that the reader can never anticipate. These poems have a sustained leanness and concentrated power. Holden is a craftsman whose poems carry one along with the vigor and the inevitability of rapids and the illumination of chain lightning. His dramatic lyrics, like those of the late Richard Hugo, evoke a quality of light in the studied landscapes whose common denominator is solitude but where, through art, beauty and the heartening sense of human community can coexist.
The “blockbuster” (The Guardian) New York Times bestseller, a shocking, definitive account of the 2020 election and the first year of the Biden presidency by two New York Times reporters, exposes the deep fissures within both parties as the country approaches a political breaking point. This is the authoritative, “deeply reported” (The Wall Street Journal) account of an eighteen-month crisis in American democracy that will be seared into the country’s political memory for decades to come. With stunning, in-the-room detail, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns show how both our political parties confronted a series of national traumas, including the coronavirus pandemic, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the political brinksmanship of President Biden’s first year in the White House. From Donald Trump’s assault on the 2020 election and his ongoing campaign of vengeance against his fellow Republicans to the behind-the-scenes story of Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate and his bitter struggles to unite the Democratic Party, this book exposes the degree to which the two-party system has been strained to the point of disintegration. More than at any time in recent history, the long-established traditions and institutions of American politics are under siege as a set of aging political leaders struggle to hold together the changing country. Martin and Burns break news on most every page, drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before-seen documents and recordings from the highest levels of government. This “masterful” (George Stephanopoulos) book asks the vitally important (and disturbing) question: can American democracy, as we know it, ever work again?
Focusing on ethics in every aspect of the business environment, The Legal and Ethical Environment of Business, Second Edition by Gerald R. Ferrera, Mystica M. Alexander, William P. Wiggins, Cheryl Kirschner and Jonathan Darrow, prepares students to work within current industry norms, practices, and legislation. Ethics coverage is integrated throughout the book and featured in nearly every chapter. Ethical theory is interwoven with practical applications using several novel pedagogical tools developed to promote focused, thoughtful inquiry and to highlight the interplay of ethics and law. The book also meets the needs of students who will be facing an increasingly international business environment. Integrated coverage of international issues goes beyond comparative law topics and includes substantial coverage of central topics in international business law, such as, bribery and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, key provisions of the Convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods, and a comparison of the Uniform Commercial Code and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Key Features: Excellent, pragmatic discussion of business organization implications and legal aspects of expanding a U.S. business internationally Crisp, thorough coverage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, with contextual material on corruption effects on society and business, as well as explanation of the law and examples Readable, concise explanation of financing international business transactions, including overview of international debtor-creditor issues, risks specific to international transactions and description of the Letter of Credit process
In 1937, the Soviet Union mounted a national celebration commemorating the centenary of poet Alexander Pushkin's death. Though already a beloved national literary figure, the scale and feverish pitch of the Pushkin festival was unprecedented. Greetings, Pushkin! presents the first in-depth study of this historic event and follows its manifestations in art, literature, popular culture, education, and politics, while also examining its philosophical underpinnings. Jonathan Brooks Platt looks deeply into the motivations behind the Soviet glorification of a long-dead poet—seemingly at odds with the October revolution's radical break with the past. He views the Pushkin celebration as a conjunction of two opposing approaches to time and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology. Monumentalism—in pointing to specific moments and individuals as the origin point for cultural narratives, and eschatology—which glorifies ruptures in the chain of art or thought, and the destruction of canons. In the midst of the Great Purge, the Pushkin jubilee was a critical element in the drive toward a nationalist discourse that attempted to unify and subsume the disparate elements of the Soviet Union, supporting the move to "socialism in one country".
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