The Confidence Trap

The Confidence Trap
Author: David Runciman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2017-10-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691178135

Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.

Trap History

Trap History
Author: A. R. Shaw
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-10-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9780978979911

A look at the Atlanta music scene and birth of Trap music.

Trapped

Trapped
Author: Karen Tintori
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0743428048

A gripping account of the worst coal mine fire in US history—the 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster that claimed the lives of 259 men. "Drawing on diaries, letters, written accounts of survivors and testimony from the coroner's inquest...Tintori's engaging prose keeps readers on the edge" (Publishers Weekly). Inspired by a refrain of her girlhood—"Your grandfather survived the Cherry Mine disaster"—Karen Tintori began a search for her family's role in the harrowing tragedy of 1909. She uncovered the stories of victims, survivors, widows, orphans, townspeople, firefighters, reporters, and mine owners, and wove them together to pen Trapped, a riveting account of the tragic day that would inspire America's first worker's compensation laws and hasten much-needed child labor reform. On a Saturday morning in November of 1909, four hundred and eighty men went down into the mines as they had countless times before. But a fire erupted in the mineshaft that day and soon burned out of control. By nightfall, more than half the men would either be dead or trapped as officials sealed the mine in an attempt to contain the blaze. Miraculously, twenty men would emerge one week later, but not before the Cherry Mine disaster went down in history as the worst ever coal mine fire in the US—and not before all the treachery and heroism of mankind were revealed.

Trapped in Time

Trapped in Time
Author: Denise Daye
Publisher: Time Travel
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2020-01-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781734317299

On the day she and her mother escaped her cruel father, Emma Washington vowed to never fall in love. Now, Emma is a back-to-school PhD student with bigger and better things to worry about. That is, until one night, exhausted, slightly tipsy, and on her way home from a party, the glaring white light of a car comes crashing toward her, changing her life forever. Instead of waking up in a 21st-century hospital, she finds herself waking up in the backwaters of London, England, 1881... Trapped in a time where everything she once knew is considered witchcraft, Emma discovers that Victorian London is a harsh world for a woman without wealth or status. She faces yet another life-changing twist when she learns her only chance of survival depends on the very thing she has tried to avoid her whole life-marriage. As if that isn't bad enough, she must betroth herself to none other than the most powerful duke in all of England, the notorious and feared Lord William Blackwell. But...what begins as a fight for her life might just become a chance to find true love.

Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States

Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States
Author: Jonathan H. X. Lee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2014-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443869791

Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow provides various exploratory interpretations on Southeast Asian American subjectivities, communities, histories, creativities, and cultural expressions, as they are revealed, informed, or infused with visions, dreams, and or memories of self in relation to others, places, time, and events – historically significant or quotidian. The interaction and interplay of visions, memories, and subjectivities is the focus of examination and interpretation, either directly or tangentially. Authors explore varieties of homes, religiosities, creativities, cultural forms and productions, and queer sexualities, utilizing critical ethnic and Asian American studies discourses coupled with other interdisciplinary approaches to provide new and alternative visions on Cambodian, Hmong, Filipino, Indonesian, Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese American subjects and their communities that links Southeast Asia to America in vexing, creative, and purposeful ways.

What Justice Demands

What Justice Demands
Author: Elan Journo
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1682617998

In this book, Elan Journo explains the essential nature of the conflict, and what has fueled it for so long. What justice demands, he shows, is that we evaluate both adversaries—and America's approach to the conflict—according to a universal moral ideal: individual liberty. From that secular moral framework, the book analyzes the conflict, examines major Palestinian grievances and Israel's character as a nation, and explains what's at stake for everyone who values human life, freedom, and progress. What Justice Demands shows us why America should be strongly supportive of freedom and freedom-seekers—but, in this conflict and across the Middle East, it hasn't been, much to our detriment.

Posthuman Rap

Posthuman Rap
Author: Justin Adams Burton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190235470

Posthuman Rap listens for the ways contemporary rap maps an existence outside the traditional boundaries of what it means to be human. Contemporary humanity is shaped in neoliberal terms, where being human means being viable in a capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. But musicians from Nicki Minaj to Future to Rae Sremmurd deploy queerness and sonic blackness as they imagine different ways of being human. Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Lester Spence, LH Stallings, and a broad swath of queer and critical race theory, Posthuman Rap turns an ear especially toward hip hop that is often read as apolitical in order to hear its posthuman possibilities, its construction of a humanity that is blacker, queerer, more feminine than the norm.

Script Development

Script Development
Author: Craig Batty
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 303048713X

This book offers the first international look at how script development is theorised and practiced. Drawing on interviews, case studies, discourse analysis, creative practices and industry experiences, it brings together scholars and practitioners from around the world to offer critical insights into this core, but often hidden, aspect of screenwriting and screen production. Chapters speculate and reflect upon how creative, commercial and social practices – in which ideas, emotions, people and personalities combine, cohere and clash – are shaped by the practicalities, policies and rapid movements of the screen industry. Comprising two parts, the book first looks ‘into’ script development from a theoretical perspective, and second looks ‘out from’ the practice to form practitioner-led perspectives of script development. With a rising interest in screenwriting and production studies, and an increased appetite for practice-based research, the book offers a timely mapping of the terrain of script development, providing rich foundations for both study and practice.

Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah

Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah
Author: Francis Landy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2023-06-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0192598724

The book of Isaiah is one of the longest and strangest books of the Hebrew Bible, composed over several centuries and traversing the catastrophe that befell the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Francis Landy's book tells the story of the poetic response to catastrophe, and the hope for a new and perfect world on the other side. The study traces two parallel developments: the displacement of the Davidic promise onto the Persian Empire, Israel, and the prophet himself; and the transition from exclusively male images of the deity to the matching of male and female prototypes, whereby YHWH takes the place of the warrior goddess. Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Book of Isaiah consists of close readings of individual passages in Isaiah, commencing with Chapter One and the problems of beginning, and ending with Deutero-Isaiah, composed subsequent to the Babylonian exile. The volume is arranged thematically as well as sequentially: the first chapter following the introduction concerns gender, the second death, the third the Oracles about the Nations. At the centre there is what Landy calls 'the constitutive enigma', Isaiah's commission in his vision to speak so that people will not understand. This renders the entire book potentially incomprehensible; the more we try to understand it, the greater the difficulty. For Landy, this creates a model of reading and writing, the challenge and the risk of going up blind alleys, of trying to make sense of a disastrous world. Isaiah's commission pervades the book. Throughout there is a promise of an age of clarity as well as social and political transformation, which is always deferred beyond the horizon. Hence it is a book without an ending, or with multiple endings. In the final chapters, the author turns to the central Chapter Thirty-Three, a mise-en-abyme of the book and a prayer for deliverance, and the issues of exile and the possibility of return. Like every poetic work, particularly in an era of cultural collapse, it is a critique of the past and a hope for a new humanity.