The Soft Cage

The Soft Cage
Author: Christian Parenti
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2007-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465009891

On a typical day, you might make a call on a cell phone, withdraw money at an ATM, visit the mall, and make a purchase with a credit card. Each of these routine transactions leaves a digital trail for government agencies and businesses to access. As cutting-edge historian and journalist Christian Parenti points out, these everyday intrusions on privacy, while harmless in themselves, are part of a relentless (and clandestine) expansion of routine surveillance in American life over the last two centuries-from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice and tracking immigrants. Parenti explores the role computers are playing in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies-such as credit cards, website "cookies," and electronic toll collection-that have expanded this trend in the twenty-first century. The Soft Cage offers a compelling, vitally important history lesson for every American concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives.

The Soft Cage

The Soft Cage
Author: Christian Parenti
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780465009893

On a typical day, you might make a call on a cell phone, withdraw money at an ATM, visit the mall, and make a purchase with a credit card. Each of these routine transactions leaves a digital trail for government agencies and businesses to access. As cutting-edge historian and journalist Christian Parenti points out, these everyday intrusions on privacy, while harmless in themselves, are part of a relentless (and clandestine) expansion of routine surveillance in American life over the last two centuries-from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice and tracking immigrants. Parenti explores the role computers are playing in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies-such as credit cards, website "cookies," and electronic toll collection-that have expanded this trend in the twenty-first century. The Soft Cage offers a compelling, vitally important history lesson for every American concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives.

Gilded Cage

Gilded Cage
Author: Vic James
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0425284131

MAGIC RULES. WE SERVE. In a darkly fantastical debut set in modern-day Britain, magic users control everything: wealth, politics, power—and you. If you’re not one of the ultimate one-percenters—the magical elite—you owe them ten years of service. Do those years when you’re old, and you’ll never get through them. Do them young, and you’ll never get over them. This is the darkly decadent world of Gilded Cage. In its glittering milieu move the all-powerful Jardines and the everyday Hadleys. The families have only one thing in common: Each has three children. But their destinies entwine when one family enters the service of the other. They will all discover whether any magic is more powerful than the human spirit. Have a quick ten years. . . . Look for all three books in the mesmerizing Dark Gifts trilogy: GILDED CAGE • TARNISHED CITY • BRIGHT RUIN Praise for Gilded Cage “Beautifully characterised and compellingly plotted, Gilded Cage is an impressive debut.”—The Guardian “Exquisitely wicked . . . a lavishly opulent, yet brutally vivid, alternate England which subtly questions modern beliefs . . . If ever there was a speculative fiction book that captured the zeitgeist of an era this is it.”—SFFWorld “An alternate modern-day England where enticing drama and social unrest mix with aristocratic scandal and glamorous magic . . . conjuring up the specters of Les Misérables and Downton Abbey . . . an absorbing first installment that presages an intriguing new fantasy series.”—Kirkus Reviews “Gilded Cage is a heart-pounding combination of dark magic, political revolution, and forbidden romance that had me addicted from the first page!”—Danielle L. Jensen, USA Today bestselling author of The Malediction Trilogy “Devious and deliciously dark with lashings of magic, mystery, and mayhem, this juggernaut of a book will keep you hanging on by your fingernails until the very last page.”—Taran Matharu, New York Times bestselling author of the Summoner series “A dark and intriguing vision of an alternate, magic-drenched Britain, Gilded Cage kept me up long into the night.”—Aliette de Bodard, author of The House of Shattered Wings

Lockdown America

Lockdown America
Author: Christian Parenti
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2000
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781859843031

Lockdown America documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the war on drugs. Its accessible and vivid prose makes clear the links between crime and politics in a period of gathering economic crisis.

The Gilded Cage

The Gilded Cage
Author: Lynette Noni
Publisher: HMH Books For Young Readers
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0358434599

Kiva trades one cage for another when she leaves behind a deadly prison for a deceptive palace in this dark and dangerous sequel to The Prison Healer, which Sarah J. Maas called "a must-read." Kiva Meridan is a survivor. She survived not only Zalindov prison, but also the deadly Trial by Ordeal. Now Kiva's purpose goes beyond survival to vengeance. For the past ten years, her only goal was to reunite with her family and destroy the people responsible for ruining their lives. But now that she has escaped Zalindov, her mission has become more complicated than ever. As Kiva settles into her new life in the capital, she discovers she wasn't the only one who suffered while she was in Zalindov--her siblings and their beliefs have changed too. Soon it's not just her enemies she's keeping secrets from, but her own family as well. Outside the city walls, tensions are brewing from the rebels, along with whispers of a growing threat from the northern kingdoms. Kiva's allegiances are more important than ever, but she's beginning to question where they truly lie. To survive this time, she'll have to navigate a complicated web of lies before both sides of the battle turn against her and she loses everything.

Tropic of Chaos

Tropic of Chaos
Author: Christian Parenti
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-06-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1568586620

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism" -- a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

The Tiger and the Cage

The Tiger and the Cage
Author: Emma Bolden
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2022-10-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1593767242

For readers of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, this exquisitely wrought debut memoir recounts a lifelong struggle with chronic pain and endometriosis, while speaking more broadly to anyone who’s been told “it’s all in your head” In Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived, persistent coughing spell—something the medical establishment will later use against her as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle. With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine—from a history of labeling women “hysterical” and parading them as curiosities to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite more than a century of documented cases. Recounting botched surgeries and dire side effects from pharmaceuticals affecting her and countless others, Bolden speaks to the ways people are often failed by the official narratives of institutions meant to protect them. Bolden also interrogates a narrative commonly imposed on menstruating bodies: the expected story arc of marriage and children. She interrogates her body as a painful site she must mentally escape and a countdown she hopes to beat by having a child before a hysterectomy. Only later does she find language and acceptance for her asexality and the life she needs to lead. Through all its gripping, devastating, and beautiful threads, The Tiger and the Cage says what Bolden and so many like her have needed to hear: I see you, and I believe you.

Profiles and Plotlines

Profiles and Plotlines
Author: Katherine D. Johnston
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609388941

Algorithmic data profiling is not merely an important topic in contemporary fiction, it is an increasingly dominant form of storytelling and characterization in our society. These stories are being told inside boardrooms, banks, presidential briefings, police stations, advertising agencies, and technology companies. And so, to the extent that data has taken up storytelling, literature must take up data. After all, profiling coincides with character development; surveillance reflects point of view; and data points track as plot points in tales of the political economy. In Profiles and Plotlines, Katherine Johnston engages this energetic reformation of contemporary literature to account for a society and economy of frenetic counting. Fiction and poetry are capable of addressing precisely that for which algorithms cannot or do not account: the effects of profile culture; the ideologies and supposed truth-power of data; the gendered and racialized dynamics of watching and being watched; and the politics of who counts and what gets counted. Johnston analyzes prescient work by contemporary authors such as Jennifer Egan, Claudia Rankine, Mohsin Hamid, and William Gibson to probe how the claims of data surveillance serve to make lives seem legible, intelligible, and sometimes even expendable.

Soft Is Fast

Soft Is Fast
Author: Meredith Morse
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262548933

An innovative analysis of Simone Forti's interdisciplinary art, viewing her influential 1960s “dance constructions” as negotiating the aesthetic strategies of John Cage and Anna Halprin. Simone Forti's art developed within the overlapping circles of New York City's advanced visual art, dance, and music of the early 1960s. Her “dance constructions” and related works of the 1960s were important for both visual art and dance of the era. Artists Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer have both acknowledged her influence. Forti seems to have kept one foot inside visual art's frames of meaning and the other outside them. In Soft Is Fast, Meredith Morse adopts a new way to understand Forti's work, based in art historical analysis but drawing upon dance history and cultural studies and the history of American social thought. Morse argues that Forti introduced a form of direct encounter that departed radically from the spectatorship proposed by Minimalism, and prefigured the participatory art of recent decades. Morse shows that Forti's work negotiated John Cage's ideas of sound, score, and theater through the unique approach to movement, essentially improvisational and grounded in anatomical exploration, that she learned from performer and teacher Ann (later Anna) Halprin. Attentive to Robert Whitman's and La Monte Young's responses to Cage, Forti reshaped Cage's concepts into models that could accommodate Halprin's charged spaces and imagined, interpenetrative understanding of other bodies. Morse considers Forti's use of sound and her affective use of materials as central to her work; examines Forti's text pieces, little discussed in art historical literature; analyzes Huddle, considered one of Forti's signature works; and explicates Forti's later improvisational practice. Forti has been relatively overlooked by art historians, perhaps because of her work's central concern with modes of feeling and embodiment, unlike other art of the 1960s, which was characterized by strategies of depersonalization and affectlessness. Soft Is Fast corrects this critical oversight.