"This imaginative and singular poetry collection interrogates the broadest ideas surrounding the humble pig--farm animal, men/masculinity, police and state violence, desire, queerness, global food systems, religion/Judaism and law--to reimagine various chaotic histories of the body, faith, ecology, desire, hygiene, and power. Sam Sax draws on autobiography and history to create poems that explore topics ranging from drag queens and Miss Piggy to pig farming and hog lagoons. Collectively, these poems, borne of Sax's obsession, offer a varied picture of what it means to be a human being. Delivered in a variety of forms, infused with humor, grace, sadness, and anger, Pig is a wholly unique collection from a virtuosic and original poet"--

We are living through the consequences of a linguistic revolution. Dramatic linguistic change has left us at the beginning of a new era in the evolution of human language, with repercussions for many individual languages. In this book, David Crystal, one of the world's authorities on language, brings together for the first time the three major trends which he argues have fundamentally altered the world's linguistic ecology: first, the emergence of English as the world's first truly global language; second, the crisis facing huge numbers of languages which are currently endangered or dying; and, third, the radical effect on language of the arrival of Internet technology. Examining the interrelationships between these topics, Crystal encounters a vision of a linguistic future which is radically different from what has existed in the past, and which will make us revise many cherished concepts relating to the way we think about and work with languages. Everyone is affected by this linguistic revolution. The Language Revolution will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication in the twenty-first century.

"The messianic surge that engulfed Chabad (the Lubavitch Hasidic movement) in the last generations hardly subsided after the 1994 death of the movement's last leader and designated Messiah. Focusing on the radically messianic Hasidim (meshichistim) who deny that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneershon has ever died, this book investigates the ways followers make their absent Rebbe present. It shows how the meshichistim, recurring to a rich repertoire of both traditional and ultramodern means, are able to engage in ongoing dialogue with the Rebbe, to render him "portable" and embodied, and even to see and hear him. Their toolkit includes the dialectical mysticism of Chabad, which denies the ontological status of the world; practices of embodiment, based on a ritual ecology replete with signs and traces of the Rebbe; and a visual culture that makes the Rebbe's ubiquitous portraits and videos the focus of an elaborate cult. The virtual Rebbe that emerges as a result-one who is multiple, visible, accessible, and highly decentralized-helps us chart the religious horizons open to a twenty-first-century messianic movement"--

"For a long time, we humans have excelled in mimicking nature with the goal of exploiting it. Now, with the existential threat of global climate change on the horizon, the ever-provocative Michael Taussig asks what it would take to change ourselves so as to save our world. Acknowledging the possibility of collapse and our all-too-human impotence in the face of accelerating disaster, this book is not solely a reflection on our tragic condition but also a theoretical effort to reckon with those human faculties that have fed our ambition for dominance over nature. At stake is an ultimate undoing of our sense of control--a "mastery of non-mastery." Animated by the urgency of a planet approaching meltdown, Taussig captures our moment, and all its attendant mythologies, with luminescent clarity"--