At the End of an Age

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Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300101614
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis At the End of an Age by : John Lukacs

Download or read book At the End of an Age written by John Lukacs and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-10 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the End of an Age isa deeply informed and rewarding reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of extraordinary philosophical, religious, and historical scope, it is the product of a great historian's lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it offers a compelling framework for understanding history, science, and man's capacity for self-knowledge. In this work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about five hundred years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs's view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of "Science," including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion--in its way a summa ofthe author's thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous twenty-odd books--leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very center of the universe--the only universe we know and can know.

The Age of A.I.

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Author :
Publisher : Little, Brown
ISBN 13 : 0316330213
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (163 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of A.I. by : Henry A Kissinger

Download or read book The Age of A.I. written by Henry A Kissinger and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming human society fundamentally and profoundly. Not since the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason have we changed how we approach knowledge, politics, economics, even warfare. Three of our most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore what it means for us all. An A.I. that learned to play chess discovered moves that no human champion would have conceived of. Driverless cars edge forward at red lights, just like impatient humans, and so far, nobody can explain why it happens. Artificial intelligence is being put to use in sports, medicine, education, and even (frighteningly) how we wage war. In this book, three of our most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore how A.I. could affect our relationship with knowledge, impact our worldviews, and change society and politics as profoundly as the ideas of the Enlightenment.

The Age of Questions

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Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691210373
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Questions by : Holly Case

Download or read book The Age of Questions written by Holly Case and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth century In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time? In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature. Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

The Age of Dignity

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Publisher : New Press, The
ISBN 13 : 1620970465
Total Pages : 149 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Dignity by : Ai-jen Poo

Download or read book The Age of Dignity written by Ai-jen Poo and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Time’s 100 most influential people “shines a new light on the need for a holistic approach to caregiving in America . . . Timely and hopeful” (Maria Shriver). In The Age of Dignity, thought leader and activist Ai-jen Poo offers a wake-up call about the statistical reality that will affect us all: Fourteen percent of our population is now over sixty-five; by 2030 that ratio will be one in five. In fact, our fastest-growing demographic is the eighty-five-plus age group—over five million people now, a number that is expected to more than double in the next twenty years. This change presents us with a new challenge: how we care for and support quality of life for the unprecedented numbers of older Americans who will need it. Despite these daunting numbers, Poo has written a profoundly hopeful book, giving us a glimpse into the stories and often hidden experiences of the people—family caregivers, older people, and home care workers—whose lives will be directly shaped and reshaped in this moment of demographic change. The Age of Dignity outlines a road map for how we can become a more caring nation, providing solutions for fixing our fraying safety net while also increasing opportunities for women, immigrants, and the unemployed in our workforce. As Poo has said, “Care is the strategy and the solution toward a better future for all of us.” “Every American should read this slender book. With luck, it will be the future for all of us.” —Gloria Steinem “Positive and inclusive.” —The New York Times “A big-hearted book [that] seeks to transform our dismal view of aging and caregiving.” —Ms. magazine

The Age of Everything

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Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226322947
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Everything by : Matthew Hedman

Download or read book The Age of Everything written by Matthew Hedman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-08-13 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking advantage of recent advances throughout the sciences, Matthew Hedman brings the distant past closer to us than it has ever been. Here, he shows how scientists have determined the age of everything from the colonization of the New World over 13,000 years ago to the origin of the universe nearly fourteen billion years ago. Hedman details, for example, how interdisciplinary studies of the Great Pyramids of Egypt can determine exactly when and how these incredible structures were built. He shows how the remains of humble trees can illuminate how the surface of the sun has changed over the past ten millennia. And he also explores how the origins of the earth, solar system, and universe are being discerned with help from rocks that fall from the sky, the light from distant stars, and even the static seen on television sets. Covering a wide range of time scales, from the Big Bang to human history, The Age of Everything is a provocative and far-ranging look at how science has determined the age of everything from modern mammals to the oldest stars, and will be indispensable for all armchair time travelers. “We are used to being told confidently of an enormous, measurable past: that some collection of dusty bones is tens of thousands of years old, or that astronomical bodies have an age of some billions. But how exactly do scientists come to know these things? That is the subject of this quite fascinating book. . . . As told by Hedman, an astronomer, each story is a marvel of compressed exegesis that takes into account some of the most modern and intriguing hypotheses.”—Steven Poole, Guardian “Hedman is worth reading because he is careful to present both the power and peril of trying to extract precise chronological data. These are all very active areas of study, and as you read Hedman you begin to see how researchers have to be both very careful and incredibly audacious, and how much of our understanding of ourselves—through history, through paleontology, through astronomy—depends on determining the age of everything.”—Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe

The Age of Entitlement

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Author :
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1501106910
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Entitlement by : Christopher Caldwell

Download or read book The Age of Entitlement written by Christopher Caldwell and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.

The Age of Lincoln

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Publisher : Hill and Wang
ISBN 13 : 1429939559
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Lincoln by : Orville Vernon Burton

Download or read book The Age of Lincoln written by Orville Vernon Burton and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2008-07-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, the age's most extraordinary accomplishment, was not its most profound. The enduring legacy of the age of Lincoln was inscribing personal liberty into the nation's millennial aspirations. America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s pessimism accompanied marked extremism, as Millerites predicted the Second Coming, utopianists planned perfection, Southerners made slavery an inviolable honor, and Northerners conflated Manifest Destiny with free-market opportunity. Even amid historic political compromises the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the president's authentic Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right to be expanded to all Americans. In the violent decades to follow, the extent of that freedom would be contested but not its central place in what defined the country. Presenting a fresh conceptualization of the defining decades of modern America, The Age of Lincoln is narrative history of the highest order.

The Age of the Ship of the Line

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Author :
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 080322267X
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of the Ship of the Line by : Jonathan R. Dull

Download or read book The Age of the Ship of the Line written by Jonathan R. Dull and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly two hundred years huge wooden warships called ships of the line dominated war at sea and were thus instrumental in the European struggle for power and the spread of imperialism. Foremost among the great naval powers were Great Britain and France, whose advanced economies could support large numbers of these expensive ships. This book, the first joint history of these great navies, offers a uniquely impartial and comprehensive picture of the two forces their shipbuilding programs, naval campaigns, and battles, and their wartime strategies and diplomacy. Jonathan R. Dull is the author of two award-winning histories of the French navy. Bringing to bear years of study of war and diplomacy, his book conveys the fine details and the high drama of the age of grand and decisive naval conflict. Dull delves into the seven wars that Great Britain and France, often in alliance with lesser naval powers such as Spain and the Netherlands, fought between 1688 and 1815. Viewing war as most statesmen of the time saw it as a contest of endurance he also treats the tragic side of the Franco-British wars, which shattered the greater security and prosperity the two powers enjoyed during their brief period as allies.

Such a Fun Age

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0525541926
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis Such a Fun Age by : Kiley Reid

Download or read book Such a Fun Age written by Kiley Reid and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • NPR • Vogue • Elle • Real Simple • InStyle • Good Housekeeping • Parade • Slate • Vox • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal • BookPage Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize An Instant New York Times Bestseller A Reese's Book Club Pick "The most provocative page-turner of the year." --Entertainment Weekly "I urge you to read Such a Fun Age." --NPR A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both. Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right. But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other. With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.

Beauty in the Age of Empire

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Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231549288
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Beauty in the Age of Empire by : Raja Adal

Download or read book Beauty in the Age of Empire written by Raja Adal and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When modern primary schools were first founded in Japan and Egypt in the 1870s, they did not teach art. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, art education was a permanent part of Japanese and Egyptian primary schooling. Both countries taught music and drawing, and wartime Japan also taught calligraphy. Why did art education become a core feature of schooling in societies as distant as Japan and Egypt, and how is aesthetics entangled with nationalism, colonialism, and empire? Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive. With aesthetics, educators sought to enchant children with sounds and sights, using their ears and eyes to make ideologies into objects of desire. Spanning multiple languages and continents, and engaging with the histories of nationalism, art, education, and transnational exchanges, Beauty in the Age of Empire offers a strikingly original account of the rise of aesthetics in modern schools and the modern world. It shows that, while aesthetics is important to all societies, it was all the more important for those countries on the receiving end of Western expansion, which could not claim to be wealthier or more powerful than Western empires, only more beautiful.

The Age of Napoleon

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Author :
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780618154616
Total Pages : 484 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (546 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Napoleon by : J. Christopher Herold

Download or read book The Age of Napoleon written by J. Christopher Herold and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE AGE OF NAPOLEON is the biography of an enigmatic and legendary personality as well as the portrait of an entire age. J. Christopher Herold tells the fascinating story of the Napoleonic world in all its aspects -- political, cultural, military, commercial, and social. Napoleon"s rise from common origins to enormous political and military power, as well as his ultimate defeat, influenced our modern age in thousands of ways, from the map of Europe to the metric system, from styles of dress and dictators to new conventions of personal behavior.

The Age of Magic

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Author :
Publisher : Other Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1635422698
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Magic by : Ben Okri

Download or read book The Age of Magic written by Ben Okri and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this enchanting novel from the Booker Prize–winning author, a group of world-weary travelers discover the meaning of life in a mysterious Swiss mountain village. The Age of Magic has begun. Unveil your eyes. Eight weary filmmakers, traveling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travelers will find themselves drawn into the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way. An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.

The Age of Innocence

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Author :
Publisher : e-artnow
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (57 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Innocence by : Edith Wharton

Download or read book The Age of Innocence written by Edith Wharton and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride's cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. The novel is noted for attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, as well as for the social tragedy of its plot.

Age of System

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Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421417103
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Age of System by : Hunter Heyck

Download or read book Age of System written by Hunter Heyck and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years after World War II, a new generation of scholars redefined the central concepts and practices of social science in America. Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, “high modern” social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behavior—and to remake the world in the image of their new model man. In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists—shaped by encounters with the ongoing “organizational revolution” and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control—embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction. These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1,800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars—and the dreams—of a generation of scholars that believed in “the system.” He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modeling. A highly accomplished historian, Heyck relays this complicated story with unusual clarity.

Age of Anger

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Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374715823
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Age of Anger by : Pankaj Mishra

Download or read book Age of Anger written by Pankaj Mishra and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 • Named a Best Book of the Year by Slate and NPR • Longlisted for the Orwell Prize One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present. He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises—of freedom, stability, and prosperity—were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world—or were left, or pushed, behind—reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally. Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity—with the same terrible results. Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.

The Age of Em

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198754620
Total Pages : 522 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Em by : Robin Hanson

Download or read book The Age of Em written by Robin Hanson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think that the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or "ems." Robin Hanson draws on decades of expertise in economics, physics, and computer science to paint a detailed picture of this next great era in human (and machine) evolution - the age of em.

The Age of Irreverence

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520959590
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Irreverence by : Christopher Rea

Download or read book The Age of Irreverence written by Christopher Rea and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Irreverence tells the story of why China’s entry into the modern age was not just traumatic, but uproarious. As the Qing dynasty slumped toward extinction, prominent writers compiled jokes into collections they called "histories of laughter." In the first years of the Republic, novelists, essayists and illustrators alike used humorous allegories to make veiled critiques of the new government. But, again and again, political and cultural discussion erupted into invective, as critics gleefully jeered and derided rivals in public. Farceurs drew followings in the popular press, promoting a culture of practical joking and buffoonery. Eventually, these various expressions of hilarity proved so offensive to high-brow writers that they launched a concerted campaign to transform the tone of public discourse, hoping to displace the old forms of mirth with a new one they called youmo (humor). Christopher Rea argues that this period—from the 1890s to the 1930s—transformed how Chinese people thought and talked about what is funny. Focusing on five cultural expressions of laughter—jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor—he reveals the textures of comedy that were a part of everyday life during modern China’s first "age of irreverence." This new history of laughter not only offers an unprecedented and up-close look at a neglected facet of Chinese cultural modernity, but also reveals its lasting legacy in the Chinese language of the comic today and its implications for our understanding of humor as a part of human culture.