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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, anywhere. But the Walkman was also denounced as self-indulgent and antisocial-the quintessential accessory for the “me” generation. In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes us back to the birth of the device, exploring legal battles over credit for its invention, its ambivalent reception in 1980s America, and its lasting effects on social norms and public space. Ranging from postwar Japan to the present, Tuhus-Dubrow tells an illuminating story about our emotional responses to technological change. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow investigates the Walkman’s influence on public space, our relationship to electronic personal devices, and the fears and exhilaration induced by new technologies (as well as the nostalgia attached to old ones).
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979, people were enthralled by the novel experience it offered: immersion in the music of their choice, anytime, anywhere. But the Walkman was also denounced as self-indulgent and antisocial-the quintessential accessory for the “me” generation. In Personal Stereo, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes us back to the birth of the device, exploring legal battles over credit for its invention, its ambivalent reception in 1980s America, and its lasting effects on social norms and public space. Ranging from postwar Japan to the present, Tuhus-Dubrow tells an illuminating story about our emotional responses to technological change. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature. Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort. Gornick, who emerged as a major writer duri...
Winner of the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction, A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True is a grand love story and a wonderfully warm-hearted debut about a young woman and her country on the cusp of change.On the eve of World War II in a place called Half-Village, a man nicknamed the Pigeon falls in love with a girl fabled for her angelic looks. Using his 'golden hands' he decides to turn her family's modest hut into a beautiful home, and build his way into her heart.But war arrives, cutting short their charming courtship and bringing with it terrible events.Fifty years on, young Baba Yaga leaves her village to make a new life in Krakow. What she finds is not the city of her grandmother's tales but a place struggling in the aftermath of communism's fall, where opportunity seems reserved for the lucky few. Then tragedy strikes and the past reaches out an unexpected hand to her.What Louis de Bernieres did for Kefalonia, Brigid Pasulka does for Poland, weaving together the two strands of her story with a deftly magical touch into a witty, wise and heartbreaking love story that will enchant you to the very end.
An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature ar...
For readers of topical, journalistic nonfiction and those interested in environmental issues, the inside story of how the "nuclearists"--an idiosyncratic and surprising coalition of activists and experts--have turned the contentious debate about nuclear energy on its head, changing the future of our energy landscape in the process. On June 21, 2016, Pacific Gas & Electric Company announced that the nuclear plant Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo, first constructed in the 1960s and which currently provides 9% of California's electricity and 17% of its zero-emission power, would be decommissioned and closed by 2025. Then suddenly, just last year, Governor Gavin Newsom announced he was reversing...
Hard-shelled, career-minded Greta is the newest and least likely member of a sustainable foods cooperative house in Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after she joins Karin and Hal in their stately residence near campus, the husband Greta left appears on their porch, drunk, and the reason for her sudden appearance becomes clear. Yet the house members already have plenty to occupy them: a series of summer blackouts has unearthed a disquietude lurking just under the surface for each of the three residents. Gas is dwindling, electricity is unreliable, and the natural world around them is in upheaval. The uneasiness of the environ ment mirrors that of Greta, Hal, and Karin as they each make efforts to resolve their own personal crises. With subtle attunement to the hovering uncertainty affecting each of her characters, Wildgen crafts a story both terrifying and beautiful.
Living life with Joie de Vivre is being entirely comfortable to be your authentic self, to be really grateful and at your most happy in your life. It is the moments you can truly savor knowing that you listened and trusted the real love in your heart, all the love in your life. Its having full faith in yourself and to be the best that you can be. Knowing you can trust your heart to live well with solid relationship you have established with your authentic self and with others, knowing you have done your absolute best. Its living with no fear, with absolute joy, going after exactly what you want, fully enjoying the journey of your life and really living in the present, this very moment, because you know life is beautiful. Joie de Vivre is enjoying life to its fullest and embracing what life offers.
When seventeen-year-old Anju wins an all-expenses-paid scholarship to study in New York for a year, she jumps at the chance to leave her home town in Kerala and embrace all that America has to offer. But there are bittersweet consequences ahead, not only for Anju, but also for the father and older sister she has left behind. For when the lie behnd Anju's scholarship is suddenly revealed she is left without a visa and, too proud to confess to her family, goes into hiding. She accepts a job in a suburban beauty salon and the offer of a roof over her head from the kindly Bird, who strangely seems to know more about Anju's past than Anju herself has told her. Meanwhile, Anju's family are on a mission to find her, trying not to contemplate the possibility that they might never see her again… Atlas of Unknownsis vibrant, moving and breathtakingly told -- the debut of an irresistible and utterly original new voice in fiction.