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“Mine” is one of the first words babies learn, and by the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether we are buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you, reclining, or the squished laptop user behind you? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it’s okay to knock off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, while in New York you lose both the space and the chair? In Mine!, Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading authorities on ownership, explain these puzzles and many more. Remarkably, they reveal, there are just six simple rules that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the rule that steers us to do what they want. But we can pick differently. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. Mine! draws on mind-bending, often infuriating, and always fascinating accounts from business, history, courtrooms, and everyday life to reveal how the rules of ownership control our lives and shape our world.
An original selection of work by one of America's greatest living poets. For more than fifty years, Michael Heller has been building one of the most impressive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry. His poems, shaped by Jewish and Buddhist thought and simultaneously lyrical and philosophical, engage the political and the natural world in an ongoing consideration of the responsibility and imaginative freedom of the poet. Profoundly reflective and deeply sensual, Heller is simply one of the best poets writing today. This new selection of his work, the first in many years, provides a perfect vantage from which to contemplate his achievement.
The title, and to some extent, the thematics of this book, is based on the volume's epigraph, a sentence of Geoffrey Hartman's: "The sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it cannot be removed." I explore this sense of inscription and trace as it relates to poetry, especially with respect to aspects of Judaic thought and Buddhist influences, the "poetics" of Walter Benjamin and Heidegger, in relation to a number of the Objectivist poets (Oppen, Reznikoff and Rakosi), the Israeli poet, Hyam Bialik, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Robert Duncan and Allen Grossman. The writings constitute a continuation of the interests and themes developed in my poetry and in my t...
The Choice Theory of Contracts is an engaging landmark that shows, for the first time, how freedom matters to contract.
The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experimentalist aesthetics, underground archives, and the radical politics of self-determination.
In this forthright challenge to relativist economic recipes for growth and culturalist-incrementalist views in institutional economics, Heller draws on Weber, Schumpeter, and Hayek to present a new universalistic vision of capitalism's depersonalized institutions as well as the ideological policies needed during constructed capitalist transitions.
This collection is an in-depth exploration of a central contemporary American poet with links to many key literary movements. The book provides a sweeping intellectual survey of modernism, postmodernism, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry.
Why is our world comprehensible? This question seems so trivial that few people have dared to ask it. In this book we explore the deep roots of the mystery of rationality. The inquiry into the rationality of the world began over two-and-a-half-thousand years ago, when a few courageous people tried to understand the world with the help of reason alone, rejecting the comforting fabric of myth and legend. After many philosophical and theological adventures the Greek concept of rationality laid the foundations of a revolutionary way of thinking: the scientific method, which transformed the world. But looking at the newest fruits of the world's rationality - relativity theory, quantum mechanics, ...
The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.
The voice of a renowned professor of philosophy in Poland, who is also a Roman Catholic priest, is introduced to the United States in this collection of his provocative essays on the interplay of science and religion. Michael Heller progressively outlines systematic steps that might lead to a peaceful coexistence of these traditionally separate fields of study. Some essays have their roots in the author's work in physics and cosmology, while others present his theories on the language of God, creation, and transcendence, inspired by his work in the applications of so-called noncommutative geometry, an emerging field of study. The book is organized into four sections, each preceded by a brief...