Bored Bookworm | Politics

Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates
generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video
games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that
investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media.
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an
ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with
new media in varied settings -- at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces. Integrating
twenty-three case studies -- which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music
sharing, and online romantic breakups -- in a unique collaborative authorship style,
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of
in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.

It has long been recognized that most standard of living increases are associated with advances in technology, not the accumulation of capital. Yet it has also become clear that what truly separates developed from less developed countries is not just a gap in resources or output but a gap in knowledge. In fact, the pace at which developing countries grow is largely determined by the pace at which they close that gap.

Therefore, how countries learn and become more productive is key to understanding how they grow and develop, especially over the long term. In Creating a Learning Society, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald spell out the implications of this insight for both economic theory and policy. Taking as a starting point Kenneth J. Arrow's 1962 paper "Learning by Doing," they explain why the production of knowledge differs from that of other goods and why market economies alone are typically not efficient in the production and transmission of knowledge. Closing knowledge gaps, or helping laggards learn, is central to growth and development.

Combining technical economic analysis with accessible prose, Stiglitz and Greenwald provide new models of "endogenous growth," upending the received thinking about global policy and trade regimes. They show how well-designed government trade and industrial policies can help create a learning society; explain how poorly designed intellectual property regimes can retard learning; demonstrate how virtually every government policy has effects, both positive and negative, on learning; and they argue that policymakers need to be cognizant of these effects. They provocatively show why many standard policy prescriptions, especially associated with "neoliberal" doctrines focusing on static resource allocations, impede learning and explain why free trade may lead to stagnation, while broad based industrial protection and exchange rate interventions may bring benefits, not just to the industrial sector, but to the entire economy.

The volume concludes with brief commentaries from Philippe Aghion and Michael Woodford, as well as from Nobel Laureates Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow.

Surviving will take a miracle. Happily Ever After’s going to take two.

Southern Arcana, Book 6

Anna Lenoir has always fought. First to escape her broken childhood, then to prove a female shapeshifter can stand shoulder to shoulder with the men. Now she fights for money, and her reputation is as legendary as her stone-cold heart. She’s never met a man she couldn’t walk away from.

Until him.

Bounty hunter Patrick McNamara has a scary reputation of his own, along with mysterious powers linked to his many tattoos. On the clock, they’re the perfect supernatural-crime-solving team. After hours, she’s ready to rock his world. But Patrick won’t settle for just her body, and Anna’s better at breaking homes than making them.

When the heir to the Southwest council goes missing, their combined skills are the best chance of averting a territory war. But the hunt will drag them through the most vulnerable parts of their broken pasts. Daring to risk her heart might be the first fight she loses, and the stakes have never been higher.

Because Patrick will sacrifice anything for her. Even his life.

Warning: Contains cheap motel rooms, gas station chili dogs, supernatural politics and a literal flaming sword. Also, sex. Angry sex, dirty sex, sweet sex and thank-god-you’re-alive sex between a tough-as-nails heroine with a fragile woobie heart, and a dangerous hero who will sacrifice anything to love her.

How to recognize and combat the external factors that cause weight gain and make it difficult to lose weight

Tackling a weight problem is often viewed as a personal responsibility that requires making healthier choices. The latest research, however, shows that external factors—from family and friendships to advertising and the workplace environment—have an equal, if not greater, impact on America's growing waistline. Just look at the stats: A person's chance of becoming obese increases by 57 percent if a close friend is obese, 40 percent if a sibling is obese, and 37 percent if a spouse is obese.

That's where Thinfluence comes in. Through a research-based examination of the various social, environmental, and policy-based issues that are influencing the nation's health, Harvard researchers Dr. Walter Willett and Dr. Malissa Wood examine how relationships, workplace, media, and other factors are affecting readers' weight. The book offers a clear three-step action plan—analyze, act, influence—for readers to identify hidden factors affecting weight, develop a personal toolbox to combat external effects, and become positive influences on others around them.

Thinfluence doesn't tell readers to ditch their friends and family, change jobs, or move to another state. It helps them identify barriers to weight loss success and arms them with the tools to overcome these negative forces. This book takes a fresh look at today's weight control discussion, taking it where it has seldom gone before: outside of the individual.

This New York Times bestseller is a powerfully moving story of a man from humble beginnings, who identified a tragic problem and figured out how to address it on a national scale.

KaBOOm! chronicles Darell Hammond's amazing journey from a childhood spent living in a group home in Illinois to becoming the founder and CEO of KaBOOM!, one of the most successful nonprofit organizations in the United States. KaBOOM! has raised almost $200 million, directly built 1,743 playgrounds with a million volunteers, and has touched the lives of countless children and families. More than just a memoir, KaBOOm! is a call to action that will inspire readers by challenging them to rethink traditional notions of community and social change.

Zoe Chambers, paramedic and deputy coroner in rural Pennsylvania’s tight-knit Vance Township, has been privy to a number of local secrets over the years, some of them her own. But secrets become explosive when a dead body is found in the Township Board President’s abandoned car.

As a January blizzard rages, Zoe and Police Chief Pete Adams launch a desperate search for the killer, even if it means uncovering secrets that could not only destroy Zoe and Pete, but also those closest to them.

“The texture of small town Pennsylvania comes alive in Annette Dashofy's debut mystery. Discerning mystery readers will appreciate Dashofy's expert details and gripping storytelling. Zoe Chambers is an authentic character who will entertain us for a long time.” – Nancy Martin, Author of the Blackbird Sister Mysteries

“The author has struck gold by delivering a wonderful story… Betrayal, teenage angst, dysfunctional relationship and deep dark secrets will keep you turning the pages in this very enjoyable debut novel.” – Dru Ann Love, Dru’s Book Musings

“New York has McBain, Boston has Parker, now Vance Township, PA (“pop. 5000. Please Drive Carefully.”) has Annette Dashofy, and her rural world is just as vivid and compelling as their city noir.” – John Lawton, Producer/Director and Author of the Inspector Troy Series

“I’ve been awestruck by Annette Dashofy’s storytelling for years. Look out world, you’re going to love Zoe Chambers and Pete Adams, and Circle of Influence is just the beginning.” – Donnell Ann Bell, Bestselling Author of The Past Came Hunting and Deadly Recall

“Dashofy does everything exactly right in this well-crafted not-quite-cozy: compelling plot, original setting and wonderfully rich characters. Her revenge-fueled tale of small town manipulation and murder will keep you turning the pages. This series is a winner!” – Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha, Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark Award-Winning Author

“An excellent debut, totally fun to read. Annette Dashofy has created a charmer of a protagonist in Zoe Cambers. She's smart, she's sexy, she's vulnerably romantic, and she's one hell of a paramedic on the job. It's great to look forward to books two and three.” – Kathleen George, Professor of Theatre and Writing at the University of Pittsburgh and Edgar-Nominated Author of the Richard Christie Series

“This is a terrific first mystery, with just the right blend of action, emotion and edge. I couldn’t put it down. The characters are well drawn and believable…It's all great news for readers. I can’t wait to meet Zoe and Pete again in Vance Township, Monongahela County, PA.” – Mary Jane Maffini, Author of The Dead Don’t Get Out Much

• CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE (#1)
• LOST LEGACY (#2) September 2014

Part of the Henery Press Mystery Series Collection, if you like one, you'll probably like them all…

"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book."—Jackson Lears

Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi’s translation of Leopardi’s Canti was published by FSG in 2010.)
     He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or “hodge-podge,” as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.

"With the ball about to cross the line, Spanner took an almighty kick at it, missed, followed through and kicked himself full in the face, ever the competitor, he had his arm in the air claiming a foul before he had even hit the floor." If you've ever been involved in kids football; Manager, coach, bucket-carrier, supporter, parent, player, whatever, this book will bring it all flooding back, the good, the bad, and the downright funny.

A profound expansion of David McCullough, Jr.'s popular commencement speech—a call to arms against a prevailing, narrow, conception of success viewed by millions on YouTube—You Are (Not) Special is a love letter to students and parents as well as a guide to a truly fulfilling, happy life.

Children today, says David McCullough—high school English teacher, father of four, and son and namesake of the famous historian—are being encouraged to sacrifice passionate engagement with life for specious notions of success. The intense pressure to excel discourages kids from taking chances, failing, and learning empathy and self-confidence from those failures.

In You Are (Not) Special, McCullough elaborates on his now-famous speech exploring how, for what purpose, and for whose sake, we're raising our kids. With wry, affectionate humor, McCullough takes on hovering parents, ineffectual schools, professional college prep, electronic distractions, club sports, and generally the manifestations, and the applications and consequences of privilege. By acknowledging that the world is indifferent to them, McCullough takes pressure off of students to be extraordinary achievers and instead exhorts them to roll up their sleeves and do something useful with their advantages.

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act

Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art.

Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.