"The image of the addict in popular culture combines victimhood and moral failure; we sympathize with addicts in films and novels because of their suffering and their hard-won knowledge. And yet actual scientific knowledge about addiction tends to undermine this cultural construct. In What Is Addiction? leading addiction researchers from neuroscience, psychology, genetics, philosophy, economics…
Mythic themes and philosophical probing in film as an art form, as seen in works of Preston Sturges, Jean Cocteau, Stanley Kubrick, and various other filmmakers. Film is the supreme medium for mythmaking. The gods and heroes of mythology are both larger than life and deeply human; they teach us about the world, and they tell us a good story. Similarly, our experience of film is both distant and…
Films as life lessons, enlarging our sense of human possibilities.
A Bradford book."The book is organized around parallel analyses of emotion and addiction in order to bring out similarities as well as differences. Elster's study sheds fresh light on the generation of human behavior, ultimately revealing how cognition, choice, and rationality are undermined by the physical processes that underlie strong emotions and cravings. This book will be of particular in…
"Reveals the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A history of images in motion that explores the "special effect" of cinema. It has been said that all cinema is a special effect. In this highly original examination of time in film Sean Cubitt tries to get at the root of the uncanny effect produced by images and sounds that don't quite align with reality. What is it that cinema does? Cubitt proposes a history of images in motion from a digi…
In science, business, and policymaking—anywhere data are used in prediction—two sorts of problems requiring very different methods of analysis often arise. The first, problems of recognition and classification, concerns learning how to use some features of a system to accurately predict other features of that system. The second, problems of causal discovery, concerns learning how to predict…
"Although George W. Bush memorably declared, 'I'm the decider, ' as president he was remarkably indecisive when it came to U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His administration's policymaking featured an ongoing clash between moderate realists and conservative hard-liners inspired by right-wing religious ideas and a vision of democracy as cure-all. Riven by these competing age…
Artists and writers consider a tactical desertion from the "culture wars"--a refusal to be distracted, an embrace of the emancipatory understanding of culture. Deserting from the Culture Wars reflects upon and intervenes in our current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, often seen as the return of the "culture wars." How are these culture wars defined and waged Engaging in a the…
An analysis of the potential for environmental cooperation in multijurisdictional conservation zones to contribute to political conflict resolution; includes case studies of existing parks and proposals for new ones.Although the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Kenyan environmentalist, few have considered whether environmental conservation can contribute to peace-building in conflict zon…