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A transdisciplinary investigation of biological motion as the most profound definition of living existence, Biological Motion studies the foundational relationship between motion and life. To answer the question, "What is Life?, " Wellmann engages in a transdisciplinary investigation of motion as the most profound definition of living existence. For decades, information and structure have predominated the historiography of the life sciences wi...

A pioneering exploration of the defining traits and contradictions of our relationship to the future through the lens of discounting Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova's book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remai...

A richly illustrated guide to the marvelously diverse plankton of the world and their fundamental role in planetary food webs Plankton are the unsung heroes of planet Earth. Passive drifters through the world's seas, oceans, and freshwater environments, most are invisible or very small, but some are longer than a whale. They are the global ocean's foundation food, supporting almost all oceanic life, and they are also vitally important for land...

An intimate and personal account of the profound role birds play in Native American life and spirituality For many hours over a period of years, anthropologist Dennis Gaffin recorded his conversations with two Native American friends, Michael Bastine and John Volpe, about a shared passion: the birds of upstate New York and southern Ontario. In these lively, informal talks, Bastine, an Algonquin and Ojibwe healer and naturalist, and Volpe, an O...

A thorough investigation of the current combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes government spending and central bank monetary policy At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus...

A timely and urgent argument for preserving the work that connects us in the age of automation With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what peop...

A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman's body has, once again, become a fraught issue--from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk--Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of "life before birth." Caroline Arni shows how these sciences...

A beautifully illustrated guide to the natural history and breathtaking diversity of spiders around the world Spiders are dominant predators in virtually every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. A marvel of evolution with species numbering in the tens of thousands, they have been walking the earth since before the dinosaurs. Spiders manipulate the silk strands of their webs to act as a sensory field, which vibrates across wide frequencies th...

A beautifully illustrated guide to the vibrant and richly diverse world of bees The Lives of Bees provides a one-of-a-kind look at the life and natural history of bees. Blending stunning photographs and illustrations with illuminating profiles of selected species, this incisive guide takes readers inside the world of these marvelous insects, exploring their physiology, behavior, ecology, evolution, and much more. The Lives of Bees is essential...

A powerful case for why majority rule--not representation--is the defining feature of democratic politics The idea that democratic governance rests on active self-rule by citizens plays surprisingly little part in current theories of democracy, which instead stress the importance of representation by elected, appointed, or randomly selected bodies such as legislatures, courts, and juries. This would have astonished eighteenth-century theorists...

How Romans coped with the anxieties and risks of childbirth and the implications for Rome's empire Across the vast expanse of the Roman Empire, anxieties about childbirth tied individuals to one another, to the highest levels of imperial politics, even to the movements of the stars. Birthing Romans sheds critical light on the diverse ways pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three ...

A major new account of the post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance and the promise it held for liberals. The Holy Alliance is now most familiar as a label for conspiratorial reaction. In this book, Isaac Nakhimovsky reveals the Enlightenment origins of this post-Napoleonic initiative, explaining why it was embraced at first by many contemporary liberals as the birth of a federal Europe and the dawning of a peaceful and prosperous age of global progress....

A new account of the renowned Baroque painter, revealing how her astute professional decisions shaped her career, style, and legacy Art has long been viewed as a calling--a quasi-religious vocation that drives artists to seek answers to humanity's deepest questions. Yet the artworld is a risky, competitive business that requires artists to make strategic decisions, especially if the artist is a woman. In Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business ...

Challenges to racialized policing, from early reform efforts to BLM protests and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder The eruption of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in 2014 spurred a wave of police reform. One of the places to embrace this reform was Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city long known for its liberal politics. Yet in May 2020, four of its officers murdered George Floyd. Fiery protests followed, marking the city as...

A richly illustrated, portable guide to two of the most challenging groups of flycatchers to identify in the field The identification of flycatchers can be a daunting challenge for even the most seasoned birder. The Field Guide to North American Flycatchers series takes bird identification to an entirely new level by training readers to observe subtle differences in structure, color patterns, and vocalizations before delving into the finer det...

A richly illustrated guide to lichens and their biology Existing at the intricate margins of life, lichens are the result of symbiotic relationships between fungi and photosynthesizing partners in the form of algae or cyanobacteria. Comprising more than twenty thousand species, lichens are pioneers in diverse ecosystems, colonizing virtually any surface and growing at almost any altitude. Found in rainforests, polar regions, deserts, and in yo...

A visually stunning exploration of the artistic process by an award-winning nature artist Drawing Nature presents the creative process of an acclaimed nature artist, guiding readers from field sketches to finished art and demonstrating how science and the close observation of nature can be integrated into the artist's work to create dynamic, meaningful images. With chapters that flow from drawing basics to more advanced methods and concepts, t...

A richly diverse collection of classical Indian terms for expressing the many moods and subtleties of emotional experience Words for the Heart is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India's earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a "treasury"--a wordbook or anthology of short texts or poems--this collection features 177 jewel-like entries evoking the kinds of phenomena English speakers h...

A marvelously illustrated natural history of the world's mollusks Mollusks are invertebrate animals with a remarkable natural history and a rich fossil record, and their shells are prized for their breathtaking variety and exquisite beauty. Shells of the World provides a wide-ranging look at the incredible diversity of marine mollusks. An informative introduction outlines the lineages covered, followed by a directory section, split into classe...

Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork,  My Girls offers an intimate and tender account of the lives of teenage girls striving to break the cycle of poverty. In these portraits of solidarity and struggle, Jasmin Sandelson shows how girls growing up in public housing rely on each other in countless ways when navigating social media, boyfriends, and hardship, including neighborhood violence. Heartfelt yet unsentimental, these stories te...