Does late night political humor matter? Are late-night comedians merely entertaining, or do they have the power to influence the way we think about politics and politicians? Politics Is a Joke! situates late night comedy in the historical context of political humor and demonstrates how the public turn to this venue for political information, and are in turn affected by it. Using exclusive data collected by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the authors conduct a detailed and exhaustive analysis of political jokes on late night TV shows dating back to 1992 in order to pinpoint the main targets and themes of late-night comedy. Politics Is a Joke! uses a wide range of examples, from jokes about politicians' physical appearance and sex scandals to jokes about Congress and even the news media, to assess and understand the impact of political humor on political institutions, politicians and their policies and behavior. Engagingly written with analysis of jokes from comedians like Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Politics is a Joke! is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the crucial role late night comedy plays in our political universe - and anyone who enjoys a good laugh.
“Playful and (un)deadly serious . . . chew[s] through a near-exhaustive array of films, television, literature, culture, music and even cocktails.”—Times Literary Supplement They have stalked the horizons of our culture, wreaked havoc on moribund concepts of dead and not dead, threatened our sense of identity, and endangered our personal safety. Now zombies have emerged from the lurking shadows of society’s fringes to wander the sacred halls of the academy, feasting on tender minds and hurling rot across our intellectual landscape. It is time to unite in common cause, to shore up defenses, firm up critical and analytical resources, and fortify crumbling lines of inquiry. Responding to this call, Brain Workers from the Zombie Research Center poke and prod the rotting corpus of zombie culture trying to make sense of cult classics and the unstoppable growth of new and even more disturbing work. They exhume “zombie theory” and decaying historical documents from America, Europe, and the Caribbean in order to unearth the zombie world and arm readers with the brain tools necessary for everyday survival. Readers will see that zombie culture today “lives” in shapes as mutable as a zombie horde—and is often just as violent. “An intelligent and highly engaging collection that will appeal to legions of zombie fans, to students in the humanities, and to scholars working in fields that have already been affected by or are now preparing for the zombie apocalypse. It blends entertaining, illuminating, and accessible readings of zombies and zombie culture with unique interventions made from authoritative positions of expertise.”—Julian Murphet, author of Faulkner’s Media Romance
MMA is one of the world's fastest growing sports. The Ultimate Guide to Preventing and Treating MMA Injuries offers professional and amateur fighters and fans alike the sound professional advice they need to prevent and treat injuries, find a good training camp and partners, train smarter — not harder — and choose the right equipment. Dr. Jonathan Gelber translates complicated medical topics into a guide full of practical, easy-to-follow information, complete with step-by-step photos and diagrams. From joint injuries to preventing infection, from muscle strains to the hot topic of head injuries and concussions, Dr. Gelber outlines all the need-to-know details. Featuring advice from more than 40 UFC Hall of Famers and champions, as well as many of MMA's top athletes and elite trainers, The Ultimate Guide to Preventing and Treating MMA Injuries is a must-have for anyone serious about today's fight game.
In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. Racial Prescriptions explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, this book contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body. Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Racial Prescriptions will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.
Television Studies provides an overview of the origins, central ideas, and intellectual traditions of this exciting field. What have been the primary areas of inquiry in television studies? Why and how did these areas develop? How have scholars studied them? How are they developing? What have been the discipline’s key works? This book answers these questions by tracing the history of television studies right up to the digital present, surveying emerging scholarship, and addressing new questions about the field’s relationship with the digital. The second edition includes an examination of how internet-distributed services such as Netflix have adjusted the stories, industrial practices, and audience experience of television. For all those wondering how to study television, or even why to study television, this new edition of Television Studies will provide a clear and engaging overview of key topics. The book works as a stand-alone introduction and, by placing key works in a broader context, can also provide an excellent basis for an entire course.
At the heart of evolution lies a bewildering paradox. Natural selection favors above all the individual that leaves the most offspring—a superorganism of sorts that Jonathan Silvertown here calls the "Darwinian demon." But if such a demon existed, this highly successful organism would populate the entire world with its own kind, beating out other species and eventually extinguishing biodiversity as we know it. Why then, if evolution favors this demon, is the world filled with so many different life forms? What keeps this Darwinian demon in check? If humankind is now the greatest threat to biodiversity on the planet, have we become the Darwinian demon? Demons in Eden considers these questions using the latest scientific discoveries from the plant world. Readers join Silvertown as he explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary novelties—and exotic plant life—have earned it the sobriquet "the Galapagos of botany." Along the way, Silvertown looks closely at the evolution of plant diversity in these locales and explains why such variety persists in light of ecological patterns and evolutionary processes. In novel and useful ways, he also investigates the current state of plant diversity on the planet to show the ever-challenging threats posed by invasive species and humans. Bringing the secret life of plants into more colorful and vivid focus than ever before, Demons in Eden is an empathic and impassioned exploration of modern plant ecology that unlocks evolutionary mysteries of the natural world.
François Laruelle emerged from the hallowed generation of French postwar philosophers that included luminaries such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Jean Baudrillard, yet his thinking differs radically from that of his better-known contemporaries. In Laruelle and Art, Jonathan Fardy provides the first academic monograph dedicated solely to Laruelle's unique contribution to aesthetic theory and specifically the 'non-philosophical' project he terms 'non-aesthetics'. This undertaking allows Laruelle to think about art outside the boundaries of standard philosophy, an approach that Fardy explicates through a series of case studies. By analysing the art of figures such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Anish Kapoor, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell as well as the drama of Michael Frayn, Fardy's new book enables new and experienced readers of Laruelle to understand how the philosopher's thinking can open up new vistas of art and criticism.
In this second edition of The Rise of Western Power, Jonathan Daly retains the broad sweep of his introduction to the history of Western civilization as well as introducing new material into every chapter, enhancing the book's global coverage and engaging with the latest historical debates. The West's history is one of extraordinary success: no other region, empire, culture, or civilization has left so powerful a mark upon the world. Daly charts the West's achievements-representative government, the free enterprise system, modern science, and the rule of law-as well as its misdeeds: two World Wars, the Holocaust, imperialistic domination, and the Atlantic slave trade. Taking us through a series of revolutions, he explores the contributions of other cultures and civilizations to the West's emergence, weaving in historical, geographical, and cultural factors. The new edition also contains more material on themes such as the environment and gender, and additional coverage of India, China and the Islamic world. Daly's engaging narrative is accompanied by timelines, maps and further reading suggestions, along with a companion website featuring study questions, over 100 primary sources and 60 historical maps to enable further study.
This book uses Ezra Pound's The Cantos as a lens to understand modernism's ambition to revolutionize literature through mythical and scientific methods. Homer's Odyssey plays a unique methodological and structural role in The Cantos. The Cantos translates, interprets, abridges, adapts, critiques, parodies, trivializes, allegorizes, and “ritualizes” the Odyssey. Partly inspired by Joyce's use of different literary styles or “technics” in Ulysses, and partly inspired by medieval classicism and 19th century philology, Pound uses a plethora of methods to translate Homer and other classical texts. This book argues that The Cantos is a modernist vision of the Matter of Troy, a term used by medieval authors to designate the cycle of texts based on the Trojan war and its aftereffects, including the nostoi (returns) of the Greek heroes. This is the first study to explore how medieval classicism and translation informs Pound's mythical method and to systematically outline the variety and evolution of Pound's Odyssey translations in The Cantos.
This book provides an overview of the state of the art in research and development of systems for document image analysis. Topics covered include a variety of systems and architectures for processing document images as well as methods for converting those images into formats that can be manipulated by a computer. The chapters are written by recognized experts in the field and describe Systems and Architectures, Recognition Techniques, Graphics Analysis, Document Image Retrieval, and World Wide Web Applications.
Television entertainment rules supreme, one of the world’s most important disseminators of information, ideas, and amusement. More than a parade of little figures in a box, it is deeply embedded in everyday life, in how we think, what we think and care about, and who we think and care about it with. But is television entertainment art? Why do so many love it and so many hate or fear it? Does it offer a window to the world, or images of a fake world? How is it political and how does it address us as citizens? What powers does it hold, and what powers do we have over it? Or, for that matter, what is television these days, in an era of rapidly developing technologies, media platforms, and globalization? Written especially for students, Television Entertainment addresses these and other key questions that we regularly ask, or should ask. Jonathan Gray offers a lively and dynamic, thematically based overview with examples from recent and current television, including Lost, reality television, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, political satire, Grey’s Anatomy, The West Wing, soaps, and 24.
Explains why audiences dislike certain media and what happens when they do The study and discussion of media is replete with talk of fans, loves, stans, likes, and favorites, but what of dislikes, distastes, and alienation? Dislike-Minded draws from over two-hundred qualitative interviews to probe what the media’s failures, wounds, and sore spots tell us about media culture, taste, identity, representation, meaning, textuality, audiences, and citizenship. The book refuses the simplicity of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous dictum that dislike is (only) snobbery. Instead, Jonathan Gray pushes onward to uncover other explanations for what it ultimately means to dislike specific artifacts of television, film, and other media, and why this dislike matters. As we watch and listen through gritted teeth, Dislike-Minded listens to what is being said, and presents a bold case for a new line of audience research within communication, media, and cultural studies.
The Words of Winston Churchill, a study that ranges over the course of a rich, controversial and remarkable career, is about the power and art of his language as a writer and speaker. Churchill used words as the greatest of poets and orators do, and did so in Parliament and for the people, Britain and the empire, in war and peace, facing the changes in the world, and resisting Hitler and the Nazis. Drawing on the traditions of poetics, rhetoric and textual commentary, the study concentrates on Churchill’s writing and is sensitive to texts and contexts and to the archive. A central matter is Churchill speaking in Parliament and the reception of his speeches there for over six decades, although his work as a writer and a speaker outside the House of Commons is also important. Churchill speaks to the House, the people, Britain, the Empire, the Commonwealth and the world and, in crisis, defends freedom and democracy.
Metacommunity ecology links smaller-scale processes that have been the provenance of population and community ecology—such as birth-death processes, species interactions, selection, and stochasticity—with larger-scale issues such as dispersal and habitat heterogeneity. Until now, the field has focused on evaluating the relative importance of distinct processes, with niche-based environmental sorting on one side and neutral-based ecological drift and dispersal limitation on the other. This book moves beyond these artificial categorizations, showing how environmental sorting, dispersal, ecological drift, and other processes influence metacommunity structure simultaneously. Mathew Leibold and Jonathan Chase argue that the relative importance of these processes depends on the characteristics of the organisms, the strengths and types of their interactions, the degree of habitat heterogeneity, the rates of dispersal, and the scale at which the system is observed. Using this synthetic perspective, they explore metacommunity patterns in time and space, including patterns of coexistence, distribution, and diversity. Leibold and Chase demonstrate how these processes and patterns are altered by micro- and macroevolution, traits and phylogenetic relationships, and food web interactions. They then use this scale-explicit perspective to illustrate how metacommunity processes are essential for understanding macroecological and biogeographical patterns as well as ecosystem-level processes. Moving seamlessly across scales and subdisciplines, Metacommunity Ecology is an invaluable reference, one that offers a more integrated approach to ecological patterns and processes.
The police drama has been one of the longest running and most popular genres in American television. In TV Cops, Jonathan Nichols-Pethick argues that, perhaps more than any other genre, the police series in all its manifestations--from Hill Street Blues to Miami Vice to The Wire--embodies the full range of the cultural dynamics of television. Exploring the textual, industrial, and social contexts of police shows on American television, this book demonstrates how police dramas play a vital role in the way we understand and engage issues of social order that most of us otherwise experience only in such abstractions as laws and crime statistics. And given the current diffusion and popularity of the form, we might ask a number of questions that deserve serious critical attention: Under what circumstances have stories about the police proliferated in popular culture? What function do these stories serve for both the television industry and its audiences? Why have these stories become so commercially viable for the television industry in particular? How do stories about the police help us understand current social and political debates about crime, about the communities we live in, and about our identities as citizens?
In response to the tragedy of the Ludlow Massacre, John D. Rockefeller Jr. introduced one of the nation's first employee representation plans (ERPs) to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1915. With the advice of William Mackenzie King, who would go on to become prime minister of Canada, the plan - which came to be known as the Rockefeller Plan - was in use until 1942 and became the model for ERPs all over the world. In Representation and Rebellion Jonathan Rees uses a variety of primary sources - including records recently discovered at the company's former headquarters in Pueblo, Colorado - to tell the story of the Rockefeller Plan and those who lived under it, as well as to detail its various successes and failures. Taken as a whole, the history of the Rockefeller Plan is not the story of ceaseless oppression and stifled militancy that its critics might imagine, but it is also not the story of the creation of a paternalist panacea for labor unrest that Rockefeller hoped it would be. Addressing key issues of how this early twentieth-century experiment fared from 1915 to 1942, Rees argues that the Rockefeller Plan was a limited but temporarily effective alternative to independent unionism in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre. The book will appeal to business and labor historians, political scientists, and sociologists, as well as those studying labor and industrial relations.
The Cold War did not culminate in World War III as so many in the 1950s and 1960s feared, yet it spawned a host of military engagements that affected millions of lives. This book is the first comprehensive, multinational overview of military affairs during the early Cold War, beginning with conflicts during World War II in Warsaw, Athens, and Saigon and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis. A major theme of this account is the relationship between government policy and military preparedness and strategy. Author Jonathan M. House tells of generals engaging in policy confrontations with their governments’ political leaders—among them Anthony Eden, Nikita Khrushchev, and John F. Kennedy—many of whom made military decisions that hamstrung their own political goals. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere of atomic preparedness, politicians as well as soldiers seemed instinctively to prefer military solutions to political problems. And national security policies had military implications that took on a life of their own. The invasion of South Korea convinced European policy makers that effective deterrence and containment required building up and maintaining credible forces. Desire to strengthen the North Atlantic alliance militarily accelerated the rearmament of West Germany and the drive for its sovereignty. In addition to examining the major confrontations, nuclear and conventional, between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing—including the crises over Berlin and Formosa—House traces often overlooked military operations against the insurgencies of the era, such as French efforts in Indochina and Algeria and British struggles in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. Now, more than fifty years after the events House describes, understanding the origins and trajectory of the Cold War is as important as ever. By the late 1950s, the United States had sent forces to Vietnam and the Middle East, setting the stage for future conflicts in both regions. House’s account of the complex relationship between diplomacy and military action directly relates to the insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, and confrontations that now occupy our attention across the globe.
This completely revised, fourth edition of Introduction to PlantPopulation Biology continues the approach taken by its highlysuccessful predecessors. Ecological and genetic principles areintroduced and theory is made accessible by clear, accurateexposition with plentiful examples. Models and theoreticalarguments are developed gradually, requiring a minimum ofmathematics. The book emphasizes the particular characteristics of plantsthat affect their population biology, and evolutionary questionsthat are particularly relevant for plants. Wherever appropriate, itis shown how ecology and genetics interact, presenting a roundedpicture of the population biology of plants. Topics covered include variation and its inheritance, geneticmarkers including molecular markers, plant breeding systems,ecological genetics, intraspecific interactions, populationdynamics, regional dynamics and metapopulations, competition andcoexistence, and the evolution of breeding systems and lifehistory. An extensive bibliography provides access to the recentliterature that will be invaluable to students and academicsalike. Effective integration of plant population ecology, populationgenetics and evolutionary biology. The new edition is thoroughly revised and now includesmolecular techniques. The genetics chapters have been completely rewritten by a newco-author, Deborah Charlesworth.
Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres: Hard News Stories, Editorials and Feature Articles is the first book-length study of evaluation or stance in three major newspaper genres: hard news stories, editorials and feature articles, the last of which is a Cinderella genre in linguistic studies. It offers a fresh approach to exploring the ways in which evaluation or stance contributes to the construction of the three newspaper genres, each with a distinct communicative purpose. Key features include using a 900,000-word comparable corpus of newspaper texts arranged by genre and topic domain, drawing on a specially developed framework of analysis with a strong orientation to news values, carrying out structural analysis by creating sub-corpora of different parts of newspaper texts and adopting a functional approach to evaluation in newspaper discourse. Evaluation Across Newspaper Genres amply demonstrates that evaluation plays a vital and yet dynamic role in the construction of hard news stories, editorials and feature articles by performing a great variety of discourse functions. In doing so, the book also illuminates such important linguistic concepts as specificity/variation and textual colligation. Providing a new and unifying perspective on evaluation as a prime driver of text construction, it will be of interest and use to researchers, teachers and students of English language, applied linguistics and journalism.
Scientific arguments—and indeed arguments in most disciplines—depend on visuals and other nontextual elements; however, most models of argumentation typically neglect these important resources. In Assembling Arguments, Jonathan Buehl offers a concentrated study of scientific argumentation that is sensitive to both the historical and theoretical possibilities of multimodal persuasion as it advances two related claims. First, rhetorical theory—when augmented with methods for reading nonverbal representations—can provide the analytical tools needed to understand and appreciate multimodal scientific arguments. Second, science—an inherently multimodal enterprise—offers ideal subjects for developing general theories of multimodal rhetoric applicable across fields. In developing these claims, Buehl offers a comprehensive account of scientific persuasion as a multimodal process and develops a simple but productive framework for analyzing and teaching multimodal argumentation. Comprising five case studies, the book provides detailed treatments of argumentation in specific technological and historical contexts: argumentation before World War I, when images circulated by hand and by post; argumentation during the mid-twentieth century, when computers were beginning to bolster scientific inquiry but images remained hand-crafted products; and argumentation at the turn of the twenty-first century—an era of digital revolutions and digital fraud. Each study examines the rhetorical problems and strategies of specific scientists to investigate key issues regarding visualization and argument: 1) establishing new instruments as reliable sources of visual evidence; 2) creating novel arguments from reliable visual evidence; 3) creating novel arguments with unreliable visual evidence; 4) preserving the credibility of visualization practices; and 5) creating multimodal artifacts before and in the era of digital circulation. Given the growing enterprise of rhetorical studies and the field's contributions to communication practices in all disciplines, rhetoricians need a comprehensive rhetoric of science—one that accounts for the multimodal arguments that change our relation to reality. Assembling Arguments argues that such rhetoric should enable the interpretation of visual scientific arguments and improve science-writing instruction.
Imaginaries on Matter – Tools, Materials, Origins, promotes an innovative architectural research agenda that connects historical-cultural written research with digitally led material explorations. The common thread is the notion of the material imagination, disclosed in the reverie, or material daydream, which challenges overly pragmatic or unreflective material choices within current architectural practice. In bonding our imagination directly with matter while also confronting new technologies, this book promotes strategies by which architects' and builders' future relations with materials can stay rooted within the deeper concerns of cultural meaning. Imaginaries on Matter includes interviews with Aulets Arquitectes, Alibi Studio, Ensamble Studio, Geometria, Helen & Hard, KieranTimberlake, Supermanoeuvre, and Vandkunsten, as well as a postscript by David Leatherbarrow. Edited by Thomas Bo Jensen, Carolina Dayer, Jonathan Foote
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