Pretty Modern

Pretty Modern
Author: Alexander Edmonds
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2010-12-13
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0822348012

This ethnographic account of Brazils emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery takes readers from Ipanema socialite circles to telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery.

Perfectly Pretty Patchwork

Perfectly Pretty Patchwork
Author: Kristyne Czepuryk
Publisher: Martingale
Total Pages: 94
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: Crafts & Hobbies
ISBN: 1683560515

Think beyond the quilt! Sew classic blocks into beautiful quilts; then feature the same block (often in a different size) in a variety of pretty accents and accessories. Choose from 16 captivating patterns, including: sunny mini-quilt * decorative throw * Dresden-inspired wall quilt * Flying Geese baby quilt * happy tote * trio of pincushions * circular purse * petite zippered pouch Packed with tips for those who are new to sewing dimensional items, this collection will inspire you to discover what your pair of hands can create.

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness
Author: Jen Boyle
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2017-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1947447289

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to "cute" in the sense of "attractive, pretty, charming" to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around "big" aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a "cult of cute"-positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects-and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness. The Latin acutus, the etymological root of cute, embraces the sharpened, the pointed, the nimble, the discriminating, and the piercing. But as Michael O'Rourke notes, cuteness evokes a proximity that is at once potentially invasive and contaminating and yet softening and transfiguring. Deploying cuteness as a mode of inquiry across time, this volume opens up unexpected lines of inquiry and unusual critical and creative aporias, from Christian asceticism, medieval cycle drama, and Shakespeare to manga, Bollywood, and Second Life. The projects collected here point to a spectrum of aesthetic-affective assemblages related to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class dimensions that exceed or trouble our contemporary perceptions of such registers within object-subject and subject-object entanglements. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Wan-Chuan Kao and Jen Boyle, "Introduction: The Time of the Child"Andrea Denny-Brown, "Torturer-Cute"Elizabeth Howie, "Indulgence and Refusal: Cuteness, Asceticism, and the Aestheticization of Desire"Claire Maria Chambers, "From Awe to Awww: Cuteness and the Idea of the Holy in Christian Commodity Culture"Justin Mullis, "All The Pretty Little Ponies: Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness"Marlis Schweitzer, "Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty"Mariah Junglan Min, "Embracing the Gremlin: Judas Iscariot and the (Anti-)Cuteness of Despair"Alicia Corts, "Cute, Charming, Dangerous: Child Avatars in Second Life"James M. Cochran, "What's Cute Got to Do with It?: Early Modern Proto-Cuteness in King Lear"Kara Watts, "Hamlet, Hesperides, and the Discursivity of Cuteness"Tripthi Pillai, "Cute Lacerations in Doctor Faustus and Omkara"Kelly Lloyd, "Katie Sokoler, Your Construction Paper Tears Can't Hide Your Yayoi Kusama-Neurotic Underbelly"

Pretty Little Truths: Modern Devotionals for Young Women

Pretty Little Truths: Modern Devotionals for Young Women
Author: Mandy Fender
Publisher: Becky Fender
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2016-02-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780982219034

A full year of weekly devotionals specifically written for young women in high school and college. Covering a wide variety of topics from anxiety, anger, relationships, drama, social media, kindness, forgiveness, fear, fame, and loneliness. Plus much more! This book includes bonus devotionals and study tips. Each devotional gives a scripture to stand on and a Pretty Little Challenge for the week. Great for youth leaders and study groups!

Pretty Simple Lettering

Pretty Simple Lettering
Author: Whitney Farnsworth
Publisher: Paper Peony Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2019-06-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9781948209472

Learn the art of hand lettering with this comprehensive how-to book, full of beauty, knowledge, and inspiration! Pretty Simple Lettering is the perfect book for any hand letterer, whether you're new to the art or an experienced designer looking to expand your skill. In the book, you will learn the basics of creating alphabets in many different styles, how to develop those styles into one that is uniquely your own, and how to turn your lettering into beautiful pieces of art. Learning the basics of hand lettering can be pretty simple! Whitney breaks down 10 individual alphabets in various lettering styles, including upper and lower case, showing you how to form each letter, turn those letters into words, and turn those words into works of art! Discover the tools, techniques, and tricks of the trade from a seasoned lettering artist who has been in the business since 2014.In the final sections of this book, learn how Whitney approaches every design as she leads you through a step-by-step tutorial outlining her process of composition. The last section of the book is filled with project pages for you to create your own works of art to hang on your wall or gift to a friend! Every project is surrounded by gorgeous floral designs, adding a special touch of whimsy to your final creation!

Modern Loss

Modern Loss
Author: Rebecca Soffer
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2018-01-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 006249922X

Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics. At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it’s clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let’s face it: most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We’re awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit. Enter Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, who can help us do better. Each having lost parents as young adults, they co-founded Modern Loss, responding to a need to change the dialogue around the messy experience of grief. Now, in this wise and often funny book, they offer the insights of the Modern Loss community to help us cry, laugh, grieve, identify, and—above all—empathize. Soffer and Birkner, along with forty guest contributors including Lucy Kalanithi, singer Amanda Palmer, and CNN’s Brian Stelter, reveal their own stories on a wide range of topics including triggers, sex, secrets, and inheritance. Accompanied by beautiful hand-drawn illustrations and witty "how to" cartoons, each contribution provides a unique perspective on loss as well as a remarkable life-affirming message. Brutally honest and inspiring, Modern Loss invites us to talk intimately and humorously about grief, helping us confront the humanity (and mortality) we all share. Beginners welcome.

God's Laboratory

God's Laboratory
Author: Elizabeth F. S. Roberts
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2012-05-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520952251

Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, raises concerns about the nature of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do not take the same shape around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts explores how reproduction by way of biotechnological assistance is not only accepted but embraced despite widespread poverty and condemnation from the Catholic Church. Roberts’ intimate portrait of IVF practitioners and their patients reveals how technological intervention is folded into an Andean understanding of reproduction as always assisted, whether through kin or God. She argues that the Ecuadorian incarnation of reproductive technology is less about a national desire for modernity than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic practice, and kinship configurations. God’s Laboratory offers a grounded introduction to critical debates in medical anthropology and science studies, as well as a nuanced ethnography of the interplay between science, religion, race and history in the formation of Andean families.

Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women

Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women
Author: Blain Roberts
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2014-03-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469614219

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife. Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

A Beautiful Math

A Beautiful Math
Author: Tom Siegfried
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2006-09-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309133807

Millions have seen the movie and thousands have read the book but few have fully appreciated the mathematics developed by John Nash's beautiful mind. Today Nash's beautiful math has become a universal language for research in the social sciences and has infiltrated the realms of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering research published in the 1950s on a new branch of mathematics known as game theory. At the time of Nash's early work, game theory was briefly popular among some mathematicians and Cold War analysts. But it remained obscure until the 1970s when evolutionary biologists began applying it to their work. In the 1980s economists began to embrace game theory. Since then it has found an ever expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines. Today neuroscientists peer into game players' brains, anthropologists play games with people from primitive cultures, biologists use games to explain the evolution of human language, and mathematicians exploit games to better understand social networks. A common thread connecting much of this research is its relevance to the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, or a Code of Nature, in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described in the famous Foundation novels by the late Isaac Asimov. In A Beautiful Math, acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried describes how game theory links the life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences in a way that may bring Asimov's dream closer to reality.