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Before there were LOLcats, there was the art of Victorian photocollage.
Today's Wall Street Journal features an online slideshow of whimsical assemblages created by highly creative women in 19th century England. These images, which place human heads on animal bodies and assemble bizarre dinner parties in painted landscapes, are taken from the exhibition "Playing with Pictures," which was organized by Elizabeth Siegel at the Art Institute of
Chicago and is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 9.
As the Journal notes, these works were created in a society "known mostly for being formal and stuffy;" however, they often reveal a cutting wit and true appreciation for the absurd. Check out the accompanying exhibition
catalog for more, but in the meantime, enjoy the lulz.
He may be known as the Man of Steel, but after yesterday's record-setting sale of Action Comics #1 for $1 million, Superman has officially gone platinum. The transaction smashed the previous comic book sale record, which was set in 2009 when another, less pristine copy of Action Comics #1 sold for $317,200.
To many comic book fans, Action Comics #1 is not merely the publication that introduced Superman to the world, it is a cultural icon. "[It] changed the course of pop culture forever," asserts the press release posted on ComicConnect.com, the site that brokered the record-setting deal. This boast might find a sympathetic audience in Tom De Haven, author of Our Hero: Superman on Earth and eminent authority on the hero.
In his book, De Haven looks at Superman as an American Icon, a figure that represents both the struggles and triumphs of life in America. As a hero that arose from the desolate landscape of the Great Depression, Superman promised the power to redeem a nation in need. In that light, the sale of Action Comics #1 adds yet another unbelievable feat to the Man of Steel's list of achievements, proving that sticking up for the little guy is a trait that Americans continue, quite literally, to value.
Each year, Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, compiles a list of memorable quotations from the past twelve months. An entertaining mix of political missteps, slick advertising lingo, and plain old nonsense, his 2009 listadds some levity and perspective to the year in review.
Recently, Shapiro spoke to NPR's Robert Siegel about the business of selecting the year's most memorable quips and indicated the apparent difficulty of finding eloquence amid the hubbub:
SHAPIRO: I mean, I have to say, having really studied this,
there are no Shakespeares or Lincolns out there, that the kinds of
quotes we get nowadays are entirely different in nature. You know,
maybe there are eloquent, inspiring quotes out there, but it would just
take a while for us to realize it.
SIEGEL: But it isn't for
lack of politicians giving set-piece speeches and trying to sum up
their ideas very eloquently. That's a very common event.
SHAPIRO: Well, it is a common event - although, I guess, one surprise
of the year was that Barack Obama - a very intelligent, eloquent person
- in his speeches did not really try for the rhetorical heights. He
really, I think, made a conscious decision to go for substance rather
than style. And I don't believe that were any future famous lines
coming out of his inaugural address.
Think that Shapiro missed one of the year's best lines? Submit your suggestions in the comments or at QuotationDictionary.com, and be sure to follow @YaleQuotations on Twitter for your daily dose of eloquence.
In this fascinating video produced by the Teachers College Record, historian Jonathan Zimmerman discusses the little red schoolhouse as an icon of American culture and a key touchstone to be reckoned with in the pursuit of educational reform.
To read an excerpt from Zimmerman's book on the Yale University Press website, please click here.
Fans of comics and popular culture from across the world are gathering in San Diego for the 40th International Comic Con, the largest convention of its kind. For fans unable to make the yearly pilgrimage to San Diego for four days of comic madness, we'll gladly suggest a few titles that provide the next best thing.
Comic enthusiasts may be familiar with Ivan Brunetti, author of the innovative Schizo series and occasional New Yorker cover artist.As the editor of the two volume Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories (Vol 2), he has compiled graphic art from more than 75 contemporary artists in award-winning fashion. Brunetti's handpicked selections will appeal to seasoned comic fans and first time graphic fiction readers--a truly epic work.
For those interested in the behind-the-scenes aspects of comic art,In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists is a superb option. The book features interviews with industry legends including Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, and Chris Ware, as well as full-color reproductions of the authors' works, some of which were previously unpublished.
For a fun way to experience Comic Cons past, check out the video below to see designer Chip Kidd touring the New York Comic Con in February. Kidd devotees may also be interested in the monograph on his work that YUP published in 2003, featuring extensive illustrations and a detailed narrative on Kidd's meteoric rise to stardom.
Over the past weekend, amateur and professional dancers gathered in Chicago to participate in the 2009 Astaire Awards Championships, an annual competition serves not only to show off the nation’s dancing prowess, but also to pay homage to a patron saint of the sport. In his recent book, Fred Astaire, Joseph Epstein analyzes the life and lasting impact of a man “who transformed entertainment into art and gave America a new yet enduring standard for style.” The book, which will be re-released this September in paperback, was selected as one of the top five books of 2008 by the Chicago Tribune.
For those eagerly anticipating its release, we recommend listening to Epstein’s appearance on On Point with Tom Ashbrook. While there, you can view clips of Astaire’s dazzling dance performances like this one below.
During the early 1960s, New York City endured a rapid physical and economic transformation. Small shops were exchanged for office towers. Crooked streets made way for massive highway construction. It was in this upheaval that artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg gathered the relics of their outmoded city and raised them up to the level of art. Old ale cans. Tires. Retired license plates. In The Disappearance of Objects, art historian Joshua Shannon examines the work of four artists living in New York City, arguing that these halting alternatives to the cool steel and glass of the rising capitalist city were the artists’ tools for making sense of an increasingly abstract world.
Though abstraction is still very much at work in today’s New York, the city appears to be turning back to its less congested roots. Just last month, city officials shut down parts of Times Square to traffic, signaling an apparent change in tack. Today’s artists may indeed reflect these changes as well, but no matter what direction we’re heading, a book like The Disappearance of Objects will always serve to illuminate where we’ve been.
When we look back at the conditions that early Americans tolerated every day (sewage streaming through the streets, animals sharing spaces with their keepers) it's amazing that they ever achieved that near-godly state known as cleanliness.
In an enlightening discussion at the University of Pennsylvania, YUP author and UPenn historian Kathleen Brown unpacks the significance of cleanliness and its more common opposite in early America. Spanning analysis of class, race, and culture, it's a fascinating look into dress, health, and sanitation in an earlier time.
Click here to view the video on the UPenn website.
Recently, a reviewer said I was adept with teen culture. I laughed quick to drown out my husband and two sons, who were snickering and elbowing each other. “Okaay,” they said. “Uh-huh. Ri-ight.”
I’m not up to date on current music, TV shows, video games, etc.—I never have time to get on YouTube unless I’m on a mission of some kind. The social networking sites are a moving target. I’m on Blogger when everyone else is moving to Facebook. As soon as I’m up on Facebook I’m getting invitations to Twitter (!).
My MP3 player is loaded with the music that I loved when I was a teen, with a few latter-day additions. When I mentioned developing a music playlist to go with my books, (something the cool authors are doing) my husband got this pained expression and said, “Maybe you should ask Eric and Keith to do it.” The subtext was: nobody in your target audience wants to listen to what you listen to.
So sometimes I wonder if I should be writing for teens at all. I feel like I’m totally unqualified except for the fact that I once was one.
But maybe the key to writing YA stories is remembering what it was like. All I have to do is walk into a school building, and it all comes rushing back: those nasty black bathing suits we had to wear in swimming class, the humiliation of phys ed, the bad boys I used to lust after.
I remember a boy who broke my heart. He drove an orange Mustang convertible. For years, my pulse accelerated whenever I saw a Mustang.
I remember the stricken look on another boy’s face when I told him I just wanted to be friends. “That’s not how I see us,” he said, and walked away, his back very straight. He was a poet, and so was I, but it wasn’t enough.
I have notebooks full of stories, poems, songs, and essays I wrote in junior high, high school, and college. Anyone who reads that stuff wouldn’t say adolescence is carefree. I think pain was my muse for writing back then. Either that or I was always in pain.
When I was a teen, I read like a fiend. Books were a refuge for me. I remember the time I was reading Valley of the Dolls in Problems of Democracy class and the teacher confiscated it. It belonged to a friend of my mother’s so I had to go beg for it back. Books are still important in my life, but they will never be as important as they were then.
So maybe knowledge of the specifics of popular culture isn’t important. It’s not the particular band member or TV star you’re in love with—it’s the emotional memory of how it felt. You cannot write for teens from an adult perspective. You can’t condescend. They get enough of that in real life.
If I want to remember what it felt like to be a teen, maybe listening to the music I loved when I was that age might be the way to go.
I tell myself that, anyway.
0 Comments on Why I Write for Teens as of 1/1/1900
As Israel, and its millions of supporters world-wide, celebrate its 60th birthday, few realize the important role that Winston Churchill played in the establishment of the State of Israel and the shaping of the modern Middle East.
Michael Makovsky’s groundbreaking Churchill’s Promised Land, brings this and much more to light in his careful and nuanced examination of Churchill’s complex relationship with Zionism.
In exploring Churchill’s evolving and ultimately romantic interest in Zionism, Makovsky offers a fresh, more complete and revealing understanding of this great statesman’s worldview.
Churchill’s Promised Land won the National Jewish Book Award for History (2007) and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature (2008).
In celebration of the Yale University Press Centennial (1908-2008), we are proud to launch our brand new Centennial website.
Visit here to find a message from Yale Press Director John Donatich; a brief history of the Press's first 100 years; highlights from the Press’s bestselling, prize-winning, and seminal works; news about upcoming celebrations, exhibitions and media events; and more.
Two reviews of Yale Press titles appeared in the April 17th edition of the New York Review of Books.
Andrew Butterfield reviewedPoussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen. Butterfield praises the "ravishingly beautiful exhibition, ... one that attempts to renew our understanding of the artist." He particularly admires the essay by Willibald Sauerländer, calling it "brilliant." Read the entire review here.
This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin’s landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist’s early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter’s visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon.
Elsewhere in the New York Review of Books, William H. McNeill reviewedBen Kiernan'sBlood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, calling it an "even-handed treatment of mass violence as exercised by Asians, Africans, and Europeans." He went on to say, "The time I spent reading Kiernan's pages raised a disturbing question about the ways I have habitually and deliberately chosen to focus my own efforts to write world history." Read the entire review here.
For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements. View the table of contents, or read an excerpt.
Additionally, StopBadware.org blogged on an interview with Zittrain that appeared in the Management section of Computerworld.
North Korean radios that are altered to receive only the official stations. Cars that listen in on their owners’ conversations. Digital video recorders ordered to self-destruct in viewers’ homes thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. Zittrain’s extraordinary book pieces together the engine that has catapulted the Internet ecosystem into the prominence it has today—and explains that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of consumers, the Internet is on a path to a lockdown, a closing off of opportunities and innovation.
The Hartford Courant profiled Jonathan Brent, editorial director of Yale Press'Annals of Communism Project, who received a $1.3 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to develop a digital documentary edition of Stalin's Personal Archive.
After sharing a story of Stalin's correspondences with director Sergei Eisenstein and novelist Upton Sinclair, the Courant said, "It is documents like the dispatch to Sinclair that distinguish Yale's Stalin archive." Read the entire article here.
The article in the Courant was picked up by the History News Network, as well as by RussiaTrek and cafe historia, who said, "This is surely what the web was designed to do. If only other institutions would follow suit."
The digitization of Stalin's Personal Archive is a new initiative of Yale University Press' acclaimed Annals of Communism series, begun in 1992. The digitized documents from this archive will become the basis for future scholarly research, while expediting traditional book publications on topics of great importance in understanding Soviet and twentieth-century world history.
The New York Sun and the New York Observer, both running pieces on Creating Central Park by Morrison H. Heckscher, have decided to emphasize different parts of the story: one real estate, the other art.
The Real Estate section of the New York Observer contained a Q&A with Heckscher about the book. Heckscher begins, "I would like to start by saying that the whole issue of the park has to do with open space in Manhattan. Central Park is, shall we say, the conclusion of 50 years of political machinations of how to provide, for the city and Manhattan, open space mostly for health reasons—for air and space for the health of the public, and recreation." Read the entire interview here.
And the New York Sun ran a piece, "Creating Central Park," in their Arts section, with Heckscher discussing the great minds behind the creation of Central Park.
The year 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the design of Central Park, the first and arguably the most famous of America’s urban landscape parks. In October 1857 the new park’s board of commissioners announced a public design competition, and the following April the imaginative yet practicable “Greensward” plan submitted by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted was selected.
This book tells the fascinating story of how an extraordinary work of public art emerged from the crucible of New York City politics. From William Cullen Bryant’s 1844 editorial calling for “a pleasure ground of shade and recreation” to the completion of construction in 1870, the history of Central Park is an urban epic––a tale not only of animosity, political intrigue, and desire but also of idealism, sacrifice, and genius.
Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Lewis Hyde reviewed The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. He explains the book's ideas, saying that he enjoyed "the companionship of its inquiring intelligence." Hyde goes on to tell the readers, "There is much to learn here." Read the entire review here.
Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than "skilled manual labor," Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman's work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.
In an article on Wall Street-bound graduates and their nervousness about the recession, Louise Story of the New York Times asked Yale Press author Steve Fraser. Fraser, author of Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, also teaches an undergraduate seminar on Wall Street at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the beginning of the semester, Mr. Fraser noticed that students seemed to think the housing crisis was unrelated to their goals in finance and was caused mostly by irresponsible borrowers. But after the collapse of Bear Sterns, he said, they had "a great deal more sympathy for people who have already been affected by this crisis.
"There’s a sense in the class now that things are more worrying, that this may affect them."
Wall Street recounts the colorful history of America’s love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Steve Fraser frames his fascinating analysis around the roles of four iconic Wall Street types—the aristocrat, the confidence man, the hero, and the immoralist—all recurring figures who yield surprising insights about how the nation has wrestled, and still wrestles, with fundamental questions of wealth and work, democracy and elitism, greed and salvation. Spanning the years from the first Wall Street panic of 1792 to the dot.com bubble-and-bust and Enron scandals of our own time, the book is full of stories and portraits of such larger-than-life figures as J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Michael Milken. Fraser considers the conflicting attitudes of ordinary Americans toward the Street and concludes with a brief rumination on the recent notion of Wall Street as a haven for Everyman.
In "Getting it right on the money," an article on financial literacy in The Economist, Richard Thaler advises on how to improve Americans' financial literacy.
The New Republic "Easy Does It" by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein consider how to make lazy people do the right thing. (Article available for subscribers only.)
In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, "Designing better choices," Thaler and Sunstein discuss their idea of liberatarian paternalism and its impact upon society.
In his Boston Globe article "When shove comes to push," Drake Bennett assesses the flurry of ideas around libertarian paternalism.
In "Lured Toward the Right Choice," Barbara Kiviat of Time Magazine writes about Thaler and Sunstein's "new approach to public policy that takes into account the odd realities of human behavior."
Visit Nudges.org for news, announcements and to send your own nudge suggestions to the authors. Click here for an extended question & answer discussion with the authors.
After the jump are a list of stops on their tour across the United States to discuss Nudge.
CHICAGO
April 14: Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 6pm
May 16: University of Chicago GSB Management Conference, 1pm
NEW YORK CITY
April 17: City University of New York, 4:30pm
WASHINGTON D.C.
April 18: American Enterprise Institute, 12pm
May 1: The CATO Institute, 12pm
June 27: Politics & Prose Bookstore, 7pm
LOS ANGELES
April 23: University of California at Los Angeles, 5pm
Stephen J. Dubner of the New York Times' Freakonomics blog invited "blegs" from the readers--or, "questions that the Freakonomics readership could collectively answer well." The inaugural bleg--did Clint Eastwood's ever say "Read my lips"--was answered with the help of Yale Press' own Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the "wonderful" Yale Book of Quotations. Shapiro began by explaining the methodology of his work.
“Quotations research” is probably a new concept to most readers, but I have become one of the few people in the world who conducts extensive research about famous quotations. Even standard quotation books like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations are based on surprisingly minimal research, but I set out eight years ago to create a new quotation book that would use state-of-the-art research methods — as well as extensive networking — to track down the accurate origins of well-known quotes.
Check back on the Freakonomics blog every Thursday to see Shapiro's future blegs.
This reader-friendly quotation book is unique in its focus on modern and American quotations. It is also the first to use state-of-the-art research methods to capture famous quotations and to trace sources of quotations to their true origins. It contains more than 12,000 entries not only from literary and historical sources but also from popular culture, sports, computers, politics, law, and the social sciences. With fascinating annotations, extensive cross-references, and a large keyword index, the book is a curious reader's delight.
Read the rest of the blog post, including a lively conversation in the comments section.
The Technology Liberation Front's Adam Thierer reviewed Jonathan Zittrain'sThe Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. Finding the book interesting, he recommended--and later, implored--his readers to pick up a copy. Zittrain's provocative ideas about "generative" and "sterile" appliances inspire Thierer's extensive response and the comments that follow. "It’s an important and enlightening book about one possible vision of the Net’s future," Thierer says. Read the entire review here.
North Korean radios that are altered to receive only the official stations. Cars that listen in on their owners’ conversations. Digital video recorders ordered to self-destruct in viewers’ homes thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. Jonathan Zittrain’s extraordinary book pieces together the engine that has catapulted the Internet ecosystem into the prominence it has today—and explains that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of consumers, the Internet is on a path to a lockdown, a closing off of opportunities and innovation.
Meanwhile, the Kansas City infoZine News previewed the "major international exhibition" at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, "Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway, 1830-1960." They said, "'Art in the Age of Steam' is the most wide-ranging exhibition ever assembled of American and European works of art responding to the drama of the railroad.... [It] will capture the excitement and range of emotions that steam-powered trains elicited as railroads reshaped culture around the world." Yale University Press is publishing The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, the catalog for the exhibition; the infoZine staff said that the catalog "is directed at both art lovers and railroad enthusiasts." The catalog will be available next month.
Through vivid illustrations and engaging texts, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steamcaptures both the fear and excitement of early train travel as it probes the artistic response to steam locomotion within its social setting. Featuring paintings, photography, prints, and posters, the book includes numerous masterpieces by 19th- and 20th-century artists, including J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Hopper.
In his Findings column for the New York Times, John Tierney wonders why Americans aren't changing their lives in reaction to climate change. "We need the right nudge," Tierney says, referring to the recent release from Yale Press authors Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Taking a cue from Thaler and Sunstein, Tierney suggests a piece of jewelry that measures the wearer's carbon footprint and displays it to the world on a scale from red to green. Writing a blog post for TierneyLab, Tierney nudged his readers to help him out with this project: "Do you have a better name, or a better nudge of kind? The best suggestion will be rewarded with a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago." Click here to read the entire post or enter the contest.
For more information about nudges, check out Nudge or the website for the book, www.nudges.org, with news, reviews, a blog and even a glossary.
Daniel J. Solove is associate professor, George Washington University Law School, and an internationally known expert in privacy law. He is frequently interviewed and featured in media broadcasts and articles, and he is the author of The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age. He lives in Washington, D.C., and blogs at the popular law blog http://www.concurringopinions.com.
"Why isn’t there a word to describe Queens residents?" was the question for FYI's Michael Pollak of the New York Times. He, in turn, went right to the authority on Queens, Claudia Gryvatz Copquin, author of recently released The Neighborhoods of Queens. Here's the full answer given by Pollak and Copquin:
A. Well, there is one, as awkward as it may sound: Queensites. Though rarely spoken, it shows up in Queens newspapers from time to time, said Claudia Gryvatz Copquin, author of a new book, “The Neighborhoods of Queens” (Yale University Press).
The lack of a common identifying word may be related to the borough’s fragmented nature, Ms. Copquin said in an e-mail message. “Residents of Queens identify more with their particular neighborhoods than with the borough itself,” she said.
For example, she said, many residents use their neighborhoods in their mailing addresses: Instead of Queens, their mail is sent to Long Island City, Jamaica, Flushing and so forth.
To read the other questions for FYI, click here. And for more information about Queens, check out the The Neighborhoods of Queens.
In Episode 13, Chris Gondek speaks with (1) Richard Sennett, winner of the 2006 Hegel Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences, about the art of craftsmanship; and (2) Gus Speth, dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale, about how the free market system will need to adjust in the face of serious environmental changes.
Download it for free here, on iTunes, and everywhere else that podcasts can be found.
In the March 12th issue of The New Republic, Noam Scheiber writes of the effect of Richard Thaler's economic theories on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Scheiber writes, "Thaler is revered by the leading wonks on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Though he has no formal role, Thaler presides as a kind of in-house intellectual guru, consulting regularly with Obama's top economic adviser." Thaler and Cass Sunstein recently wrote Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Read more about Thaler's influence on Obama here.
Elsewhere in that same issue of The New Republic, Stephen Greenblatt discusses the yikhes--"status or honor" in Yiddish--of playwright Jacob Gordin. Greenblatt positively reviews The Jewish King Lear: A Comedy in America, saying that "the late Ruth Gay's fine and lively translation of Gordin's most famous play, along with the richly informative accompanying biographical and interpretative essays by Gay and Sophie Glazer, enable readers without Yiddish to understand what stirred Gordin's original audience so deeply." Read the entire review here.
This is a comprehensive account of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, told for the first time by an Iraqi insider. Ali Allawi, former Iraqi Minister of Defense and Finance, writes from the perspective of both principal and observer, shedding new light on the story behind the invasion, the shambolic aftermath and attempts at stabilization, and why events have failed to unfold as planned.
On February 29, 2008, Yale Press author Tom McCarthy appeared on the Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC) to discuss his new book Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment. You can download the segment or listen with the embedded player below. For more information on the segment, or to hear the entire program, click here.
Spanning the automobile’s entire history, this book is the first to relate consumer behavior to the wider environmental impact of cars—from raw materials and manufacturing to use and disposal. It shows that America’s disappointing response to automobile-related environmental issues stems from the interplay of politics, economics, and desire.
