220 results for "Science"

The Einstein effect: how the world's favorite genius got into our cars, our bathrooms, and our minds

Cohen, Benyamin
"Albert Einstein's face is still one of the most recognizable in the world and he's widely considered to be the first modern-day celebrity. While many of his discoveries continue to define our daily lives, it's not just his genius that continues to shape our world. Today, more people know Einstein as an icon rather than a theorist-decades after his death, he's a celebrity with a massive online following. The Einstein Effect shows all the ways his influence is still with us today-in our systems and in our culture. Interspersed between chapters on his long-lasting scientific legacy, author Benyamin Cohen (the mind behind Einstein's Twitter account!) also tells the story of how Einstein became an unlikely social media figure and pop culture icon in the modern age"--
Sourcebooks 2023 369 pages

Hail Babylon! NPR's Road Scholar Goes in Search of the American City

Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu takes us cross-country through the withered, yet alluring American urban landscape, visiting New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Little Rock, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Portland, Oregon. He discovers that cities are at the very center of the forces determining our future, in this major work by one of America's most gifted social critics.
Macmillan 1999-06-19 272 pages

Philosophy in turbulent times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida

Roudinesco, Elisabeth
For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud. Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis. Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and persuasive, Philosophy in Turbulent Times captivates with the dynamism of French thought in the twentieth century.
Columbia University Press 2010 184 pages

We the people. Volume 3. The Civil Rights revolution

Ackerman, Bruce A.
The Civil Rights Revolution carries Bruce Ackerman’s sweeping reinterpretation of constitutional history into the era beginning with Brown v. Board of Education . From Rosa Parks’s courageous defiance, to Martin Luther King’s resounding cadences in “I Have a Dream,” to Lyndon Johnson’s leadership of Congress, to the Supreme Court’s decisions redefining the meaning of equality, the movement to end racial discrimination decisively changed our understanding of the Constitution. “The Civil Rights Act turns 50 this year, and a wave of fine books accompanies the semicentennial. Ackerman’s is the most ambitious; it is the third volume in an ongoing series on American constitutional history called We the People . A professor of law and political science at Yale, Ackerman likens the act to a constitutional amendment in its significance to the country’s legal development.” —Michael O’Donnell, The Atlantic “Ackerman weaves political theory with historical detail, explaining how the civil rights movement evolved from revolution to mass movement and then to statutory law...This fascinating book takes a new look at a much-covered topic.” —Becky Kennedy, Library Journal
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2018-07-09 432 pages

Essays on the anthropology of reason

Rabinow, Paul
This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinows pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power.The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.
Princeton University Press 1996 190 pages

Hitler's Professors The Part Of Scholarship In Germany's Crimes Against The Jewish People

Max Weinreich
Hitler's Professors is a book written by Max Weinreich that explores the role of scholarship and academia in the atrocities committed against the Jewish people during the Nazi regime in Germany. The book examines the complicity of German professors and intellectuals in the promotion and justification of Nazi ideology and the persecution of Jews, as well as the impact of their teachings on the broader society. Weinreich explores the ways in which these academics used their positions of power to legitimize anti-Semitic beliefs, and how their work contributed to the dehumanization and ultimate genocide of millions of innocent people. The book provides a detailed analysis of the historical and cultural context in which these events took place, drawing on primary sources and interviews with survivors and witnesses. It is a powerful and sobering account of the role that scholarship can play in perpetuating injustice and oppression, and a reminder of the importance of critical thinking and ethical responsibility in the pursuit of knowledge.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
Literary Licensing, LLC 2011-05 294 pages

Orwell's politics

Newsinger, John
Orwell's politics is a study of George Orwell's political ideas and beliefs from his time as a policeman in Burma through to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It places Orwell's politics in historical context, examining his response to Imperialism, to mass unemployment in the 1930s, to revolution in Spain and to the Second World War and its aftermath. The book considers Orwell's belief that socialist revolution was the only road to victory in wartime Britain. It discusses his time at the BBC and at the leftwing Labour newspaper Tribune. Particular attention is paid to Orwell's American connection, to his writings for Partisan Review and for Politics. Orwell's belief that Russia had nothing in common with socialism is discussed and new sources for Nineteen Eighty-Four are identified. The book also discusses recent feminist critiques of Orwell's politics. Newsinger demonstrates that, while Orwell's political beliefs inevitably changed over the years, he remained a committed socialist up to the time of his death. Orwell's anti-Stalinism was a consequence of his socialism rather than a repudiation of it.
Palgrave 2001 178 pages

Whitewash III The Photographic Whitewash of the JFK Assassination

Harold Weisberg
Influential assassination researcher Harold Weisberg revolves the third installment in his Whitewash series around the photographic evidence available to government officials investigating the death of John F. Kennedy. Given the materials and photographs available to the Warren Commission, Weisberg shows that in numerous cases the government either ignored the evidence it had in front of it or intentionally misrepresented evidence. Using the photographs themselves to show the inadequacies of the government’s research techniques, as well as the impossible conclusions at which the government arrived, Weisberg’s most damning argument is that the government twisted the evidence to make it fit preconceived theories and explanations for the assassination of the president. In the years since its original publication in 1974, the books in Weisberg’s Whitewash series have become classics of assassination literature and have established the author as one of the premier investigators and researchers in his field. Decades later, the shocking revelations painstakingly detailed in his work have lost none of their impact, and the information uncovered beneath the government’s whitewash is crucial to understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Skyhorse 2013-10-01 296 pages

Never Again! The Government Conspiracy in the JFK Assassination

Harold Weisberg
Originally published in 1995, and in the same classic investigative style of Whitewash and Case Open , Harold Weisberg turns his sharp investigative eye towards the events surrounding the autopsy of John F. Kennedy. Inside Never Again! you’ll find: • The specific truths regarding the autopsy of John F. Kennedy—truths that have for thirty years been buried, distorted, or ignored not only by the government but also by the national press • The blatant errors and calculated deceit of the Journal of the American Medical Association in their 1992 reports on the Kennedy autopsy • The path of conspiracy leading from the Navy Hospital in Bethesda through the corridors of the FBI to the Justice Department, into the office of the attorney general and eventually that of the president Weisberg argues this case with exclusive regard for the facts. Facts lead to the book’s startling new illuminations. Facts provide a compelling narrative filled with intrigue and laced with outrage. Facts reveal the failure of America’s institutions to deal effectively with perhaps its most profound national tragedy. In the face of overwhelming facts, Harold Weisberg justly warns us that this must never again happen!
Skyhorse 2013-09-03 544 pages

Irving Howe

Gerald Sorin
A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years. Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.
New York University Press 2002 386 pages

The end of parliamentary socialism: from Benn to Blair

Panitch, Leo
Review “Leo Panitch and Colin Leys have written a book whose significance extends far beyond the specific case of the British Labour Party.”—Critical Sociology “... a brilliant refutation of New Labour’s version of history. With an impressive range of evidence, careful analysis and a theoretical framework, [Panitch and Leys] have provided a highly readable and committed book ... recommended for everyone who really wants to understand the politics and recent history of the Labour Party.”—Contemporary Politics “... a rich and immensely enjoyable narrative, full of detail about the trajectory taken by Labour over the last quarter-century.”—Times Literary Supplement Product Description This trenchant account of the last twenty-five years of the British Labour Party argues that Tony Blair’s modernizing tendency was profoundly mistaken in asserting that the only alternative to traditional social democracy and narrow parliamentarianism was an acceptance of neo-liberalism. In blaming the Labour left, rather than the social-democratic right for the party’s years in the electoral wilderness, the modernizers rejected the creativity and energy which the party’s New Left had mobilized, and without which their own professed aim of democratic renewal was unlikely to be realized. About the Author Colin Leys is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. His previous books include Politics in Britain, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory and, with Leo Panitch, The End of Parliamentary Socialism. Leo Panitch is Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University. Editor of The Socialist Register for 25 years, his many books include Working Class Politics in Crisis, A Different Kind of State, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, and American Empire and The Political Economy of Global Finance.
Verso 1997 341 pages

On being human

Fromm, Erich
Anyone attempting to identify the thread that runs through the writings of the late Erich Fromm (1900-1980) will soon discover an unequivocally humanistic worldview. This was Fromm's guiding principle. From the 1930s on it signified his break with the Institute for Social Research, and marked his disputes with Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Fromm himself frequently refers in his writings to the humanistic aspect of man: humanistic science, humanistic socialism, humanistic religion, humanistic psychoanalysis. This posthumous volume includes writings from one of Fromm's most fertile periods, the 1960s, during the last twenty years of his life. They are based on lectures, works written for specific occasions, and manuscripts intended as books. Of special interest is the extended essay on two very difficult thinkers, Meister Eckhart and Karl Marx.
Continuum 1994 180 pages

The persistence of faith: religion, morality & society in a secular age

Sacks, Jonathan
In this expanded version of the 1990 BBC Reith Lectures, Sacks argues that religious identities maintain a striking persistence in the modern world. Their influence has been underestimated, partly because of an oversimplified view of secularisation, partly because of a failure of social thought to move beyond the individual and the state. Communities of faith form an essential part of the moral ecology of liberal sciences --Book jacket.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1991 118 pages

Victory and vexation in science: Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others

Holton, Gerald James
Never has the power of scientific research to solve existing problems and uncover new ones been more evident than it is today. Yet there exists widespread ignorance about the larger contexts within which scientific research is carried out. For example, the point of view some scientists adopt in their work or in their social commitments may become clearer if considered in light of the opposing views held by other scientists. This is a theme Gerald Holton addresses in his new collection. Whether considering conflicts between Heisenberg and Einstein, Bohr and Einstein, or P. W. Bridgman and B. F. Skinner; tracing I. I. Rabi's shift of attention from superb science to education and scientific statesmanship; or examining the emergence, in the last few decades, of the need to connect scientific research to societal needs--in each case, Holton demonstrates a masterly understanding of modern science and how it influences our world. The author shows why, at any given time--even in the mature phase of science--there exists no single "paradigm," but rather a spectrum of competing perspectives; and why so much good science has been based, from antiquity to today, on a relatively small number of presuppositions.
Harvard University Press 2005-05-30 229 pages