From plasma screens to smartphones, today moving images are everywhere. How have films adapted to this new environment? And how has the experience of the spectator changed because of this proliferation? In Broad Daylight investigates one of the decisive shifts in the history of Western aesthetics, exploring the metamorphosis of films in the age of individual media, when the public is increasingly free but also increasingly resistant to the emotive force of the pictures flashing around us. Moving deftly from philosophy of mind to film theory, from architectural practice to ethics, from Leon Battista Alberti to Orson Welles, Gabriele Pedullà examines the revolution that is reshaping the entire system of the arts and creativity in all its manifestations.
How the Murder of More Than Two Million Jews Was Carried Out—In Broad Daylight Based on a decade of work by Father Patrick Desbois and his team at Yahad–In Unum that has culminated to date in interviews with more than 5,700 neighbors to the murdered Jews and visits to more than 2,700 extermination sites, many of them unmarked. One key finding: Genocide does not happen without the neighbors. The neighbors are instrumental to the crime. In his National Jewish Book Award–winning book The Holocaust by Bullets, Father Patrick Desbois documented for the first time the murder of 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II. Nearly a decade of further work by his team, drawing on interviews with neighbors of the Jews, wartime records, and the application of modern forensic practices to long-hidden grave sites. has resulted in stunning new findings about the extent and nature of the genocide. In Broad Daylight documents mass killings in seven countries formerly part of the Soviet Union that were invaded by Nazi Germany. It shows how these murders followed a template, or script, which included a timetable that was duplicated from place to place. Far from being kept secret, the killings were done in broad daylight, before witnesses. Often, they were treated as public spectacle. The Nazis deliberately involved the local inhabitants in the mechanics of death—whether it was to cook for the killers, to dig or cover the graves, to witness their Jewish neighbors being marched off, or to take part in the slaughter. They availed themselves of local people and the structures of Soviet life in order to make the Eastern Holocaust happen. Narrating in lucid, powerful prose that has the immediacy of a crime report, Father Desbois assembles a chilling account of how, concretely, these events took place in village after village, from the selection of the date to the twenty-four-hour period in which the mass murders unfolded. Today, such groups as ISIS put into practice the Nazis’ lessons on making genocide efficient. The book includes an historical introduction by Andrej Umansky, research fellow at the Institute for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, University of Cologne, Germany, and historical and legal advisor to Yahad-In Unum.
Artistic modernism. To most of us it would seem a separate universe with its own esoteric intention and logic. What Lars Holger Holm shows in this essay, however, is how intimately the development of various modern artistic idioms, and their theoretical underpinnings, have been linked to concomitant social revolutions and to the highly politicised, theoretical, even racial agendas, entertained by people in the highest places. He also demonstrates how big money has thoroughly perverted art and artists, turning the latter into simple con men performing their charades to a whole world of spectators, manipulated by financial institutions, press, politicians and the media alike into believing that the contemporary art scene really ought to have some kind of meaning... And it does. Only, it's not artistic but exclusively financial and political.
Yehling explores a world without the many masks of fear and self-trickery that people wear for acceptance and survival, a world in which they reveal their deepest selves. This collection also features a few selections written in previously forgotten Ancient Greek poetry forms, as well as a series of new challenging and entertaining essays.
In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world - changing it almost beyond recognition. In this extraordinary new book, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realisation of Marx's prediction that 'all that is solid melts into air.' With the automation of work, the virtualisation of money, the dissipation of class communities and the rise of immaterial, intellectual labour, the global capitalist edifice is beginning to crumble, more quickly than ever before-and it is now on the verge of vanishing entirely. But what will come next? Against a backdrop of constant socio-technological upheaval, how could any kind of authentic change take place? In such a context, Zizek argues, there can be no great social triumph-lasting revolution has already come into the scene, like a thief in broad daylight, stealing into sight right before our ever eyes. What we must do now is wake up and see it. Urgent as ever, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight illuminates the new dangers as well as the radical possibilities thrown up by today's technological and scientific advances, and their electrifying implications for us all.
Lexical Priming proposes a radical new theory of the lexicon, which amounts to a completely new theory of language based on how words are used in the real world. Here they are not confined to the definitions given to them in dictionaries but instead interact with other words in common patterns of use. Using concrete statistical evidence from a corpus of newspaper English, but also referring to travel writing and literary text, the author argues that words are 'primed' for use through our experience with them, so that everything we know about a word is a product of our encounters with it. This knowledge explains how speakers of a language succeed in being fluent, creative and natural.
Selling Songs and Smiles explores female sexual entertainment ("songs and smiles") during Japan’s Heian and Kamakura periods, examining the gradual construction of a transgressive identity ("prostitute") for women engaged in the sex trade. Over some four hundred years, the character and public image of sexual entertainment was shaped by growing restrictions on female sexual activity and increasingly negative views of the female body—themselves the result of socioeconomic change in society at large. Although it is possible to paint a picture of the general decline in the status of women in the sex trade, there were also ambiguities in how they were regarded by society in the very oldest extant references to them in historical sources. Using essays, diaries, legal documents, stories, and illustrated works, this original and distinctive study unravels social attitudes toward female sexual entertainers and examines changes in their trade and the treatment they received at the hands of the court, the bakufu, and religious institutions. Compellingly argued and stylishly written, Selling Songs and Smiles challenges several prevailing interpretations, most notably the organic connection posed by scholars between shamans and sexual entertainers. Based on her exhaustive research into multiple types of primary sources, Janet Goodwin views women involved in the sex trade neither as entirely social marginals nor artisans situated within normal societal bounds. What emerges from her study is the complex and often contradictory nature of the Heian and Kamakura discourse on sexual entertainment.
Although bad eyesight kept him from receiving a commission in the U.S. Navy when he graduated from the Naval Academy in 1933, Draper Kauffman became a hero of underwater demolition in World War II and went on to a distinguished naval career. Today Admiral Kauffman is remembered as the nation's first frogman and the father of the Navy Seals. His spectacular wartime service disarming enemy bombs, establishing bomb disposal schools, and organizing and leading the Navy's first demolition units is the focus of this biography written by Kauffman's sister. Elizabeth Kauffman Bush, who also is the aunt of President George W. Bush, draws on family papers as well as Navy documents to tell Kauffman's story for the first time. Determined to defend the cause of freedom long before the U.S. ever entered the war, Kauffman was taken prisoner by the Germans as an ambulance driver in France, and after his release joined the Royal Navy to defuse delayed-action bombs during the London blitz. After Pearl Harbor his eyes were deemed adequate and he was given a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve. With his experience, he was asked to establish an underwater demolition school in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he personally trained men to defuse bombs and neutralize other submerged dangers. His men were sent to demolish the obstacles installed by the Nazis at Normandy, and Kauffman himself led underwater demolition teams in the Pacific at Saipan, Tinian, and Guam and later directed UDT operations at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His men remember him as an exceptional leader who led by example. He trained and fought alongside them, impervious to danger. Because of the high standards he set for those who became "frogmen,"thousands of American lives were saved in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Draper Kauffman's early established UDT traditions of perseverance, teamwork, and a lasting brotherhood of men of extraordinary courage is carried on by Navy Seals. This is his legacy to the U.S. Navy and his country.
