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Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.
The inevitability of what was to come hung in the air but the crowd at the outdoor arena at Caesars Palace seemed as dazed as to what was happening as Duran. Hearns, now oozing confidence, approached center ring and again touched gloves with Duran. It would be the last civil thing he did. Gliding around the ring and looking like a demented, black vampire with his goatee and Jeri curls, the Hit Man, he had reassumed the moniker for the fight, went in for the kill. Pushing Duran backwards he leapt in and clobbered the cowering fighter with a vicious right hand that staggered Duran back into the ropes again. Hearns bounced backwards and then jumped in again with another vicious right hand and b...
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On one side is snide, arrogant, dismissive, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise abusive laughter. On the other side is laughter that is warm and supportive, compassionate and forgiving, encouraging, lifting, and healing. And there is so much in between. Such great differences in laughter lead to the question—can laughter make the world a better place? This book uses television shows like M*A*S*H and Malcolm in the Middle, movies like Zombieland and Life Is Beautiful, novels like A Confederacy of Dunces and The Sellout, insights by neuroscientists, philosophers, painters, social and political scientists, and an undocumented man and his daughter, as well as ideas from people like C. S. Lewis, Sigmund Freud, Brené Brown, Tiffany Haddish, and Hannah Gadsby to answer that question.
Humor has been praised by philosophers and poets as a balm to soothe the sorrows that outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows cause inevitably, if not incessantly, to each and every one of us. In mundane life, having a sense of humor is seen not only as a positive trait of character, but as a social prerequisite, without which a person’s career and mating prospects are severely diminished, if not annihilated. However, humor is much more than this, and so much else. In particular, humor can accompany cruelty, inform it, sustain it, and exemplify it. Therefore, in this book, we provide a comprehensive, reasoned exploration of the vast literature on the concepts of humor and cruelty, as thes...
"How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement." —Richard Dawkins A memoir by one of the greatest minds of our age, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett. Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett’s answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I’ve Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fas...
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The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohe...
The magnifying glass on the UFO case with historical records. What happened in Roswell? Did the UFO issue have anything to do with the Kennedy assassination? What happened in the Bermuda Triangle? Are there secret bases for the study of Flying Saucers? Is there archaeological evidence of the extraterrestrial presence in prehistory? Has there been contact with other civilizations in the cosmos? Have beings from space intervened in the course of our history? Do governments hide information? Do aliens have any plans for Earth? Wandering Stars is an interesting work that recalls the history of flying saucers throughout our known history and encompasses topics such as: prehistoric visits by astronauts, UFO appearances in the Bible, cases of sightings of strange lights and devices down the ages, then the Adolf Hitler thing and alien flying discs, also the secrets of governments, underground bases, reversed alien technology and contact with other civilizations. Finally, he talks about the secret space projects and galactic battles behind the NASA missions.
Whitman & Dickinson is the first collection to bring together original essays by European and North American scholars directly linking the poetry and ideas of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The essays present intersections between these great figures across several fields of study, rehearsing well-established topics from new perspectives, opening entirely new areas of investigation, and providing new information about Whitman’s and Dickinson’s lives, work, and reception. Essays included in this book cover the topics of mentoring influence on each poet, religion, the Civil War, phenomenology, the environment, humor, poetic structures of language, and Whitman’s and Dickinson’s twentieth- and twenty-first–century reception—including prolonged engagement with Adrienne Rich’s response to this “strange uncoupled couple” of poets who stand at the beginning of an American national poetic. Contributors Include: Marina Camboni Andrew Dorkin Vincent Dussol Betsy Erkkilä Ed Folsom Christine Gerhardt Jay Grossman Jennifer Leader Marianne Noble Cécile Roudeau Shira Wolosky