This book appeared in Italy during the Nobel laureate's eighty-second year. The sardonic force of his shrewd observations of the contemporary scene remains unblunted even as the poet has become more involved with everyday, more private, more self-revealing. Here it gains even greater prominence as the poet attempts to find catchholds and constancies in an unstable world, finally to accede to 'precariousness the muse of our time.'

Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.

"With a fine combination of humor, compassion and vast knowledge, Talya Miron-Shatz offers clear and useful guidance for the hardest decisions of life.” -Daniel Kahneman, Nobel award-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow A top expert on decision-making explains why it’s so hard to make good choices—and what you and your doctor can do to make better ones In recent years, we have gained unprecedented control over choices about our health. But these choices are hard and often full of psychological traps. As a result, we’re liable to misuse medication, fall for pseudoscientific cure-alls, and undergo needless procedures. In Your Life Depends on It, Talya Miron-Shatz explores the preventable ways we make bad choices about everything from nutrition to medication, from pregnancy to end-of-life care. She reveals how the medical system can set us up for success or failure and maps a model for better doctor-patient relationships. Full of new insights and actionable guidance, this book is the definitive guide to making good choices when you can’t afford to make a bad one.

Subjective well-being measures are increasingly applied in quantitative economic analyses intended to elicit non-monetary wellbeing of individuals. However, the subjective nature of this evaluation means that measurement and comparison may be confounded by differences in context or may be sensitive to the implementation modality. We use two rounds of a large-scale panel phone survey data from Myanmar to explore whether the randomized placement of a happiness module – either at the beginning or at the end of the survey – affects respondents’ answers. Respondents who were asked the happiness module at the end are more likely to be happy – an increase of 7 percentage points – compared to those who are asked at the beginning of the survey. This result is consistent using different models and robust to inclusion of enumerator fixed effects and other enumerator and survey characteristics. A related question on worry in the same module yields similar findings. Results also sustain over the two rounds of survey in which we conducted the experiment.

The book analyses Plotinus’ notion of 'that which depends on us', which although central to his ethics, has never been examined in a specific study before. The book traces the sources of this notion in Aristotle and its reception in Stoicism, Middle Platonism and Early Aristotelian Commentators. It then shows how Plotinus’ critical discussion of the inherent problems in previous accounts and his investigation of the notion's application to the Intellect and the One, leads to a highly original interpretation of the notion as central to his account of human agency. The book demonstrates Plotinus’ serious engagement with the central issues of ancient ethics, and his original way of tackling them.

We document that past highly inflationary episodes are often characterized by a steeper inflationslack relationship. We show that model-generated data from a standard small Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model can replicate this empirical finding when estimated with different expectation formation processes. When inflation becomes de-anchored and expectations drift, we can observe high inflation even with a mildly positive output gap in response to cost-push shocks. The results imply that we should not use an unconditioned (not controlling for expectations change) Phillips curve estimated in normal times to predict the cost of reining in inflation. Our optimal policy exercises prescribe early monetary policy tightening and then easing in the context of positive output gaps and inflation far above the central bank target.

This is the first volume to take a broad historical sweep of the close relation between medicines and poisons in the Western tradition, and their interconnectedness. They are like two ends of a spectrum, for the same natural material can be medicine or poison, depending on the dose, and poisons can be transformed into medicines, while medicines can turn out to be poisons. The book looks at important moments in the history of the relationship between poisons and medicines in European history, from Roman times, with the Greek physician Galen, through the Renaissance and the maverick physician Paracelsus, to the present, when poisons are actively being turned into beneficial medicines.

It Depends" is a Peace Corps guide dedicated to present and future volunteers preparing for their first, second, or even third Peace Corps Journey. The title was inspired by the phrase often used by Peace Corps staff when volunteers asked questions about what to expect during their service. The Peace Corps staff always settled on the same answer, "It Depends." This guide draws from past volunteers' individual experiences as well as the author's personal journey and presents real stories, ideas, experiences, and advice on how to make the most of the Peace Corps lifestyle, experience, and journey. The author will take you through the Peace Corps life from start to finish, from considering Peace Corps to closing out your service. This guide is short, informative, fun, and will get any person considering Peace Corps excited to start the adventure and assist current volunteers in finding their next passion in life once their passion for Peace Corps has been completed.

Grab your giggle box! Here comes Barbara Johnson with another helping heap of joy for women of all ages, aches, and "architecture." Author Barbara Johnson's encouraging book about a woman's adventures in aging, Living Somewhere Between Estrogen and Death, became the number-one best-selling paperback in the Christian market for the year in which it was published. Soon hordes of happy readers were flooding Barbara's mailbox with their own favorite jokes, touching stories, and hilarious tales of female misadventures. Now Barb has packed that amazing collection of wacky wit into this boisterously funny new book that's full of "laff leaks" about every stage of a woman's life?from diapers to dentures. No matter what stage of the "hormonal cesspool" you're splashing through, there's something here to touch your heart. You'll love Barb's quirky empty-nest de-cluttering strategies, her joyful insights on stress-soothing, husband-handling, kid-corralling, and parent-parenting in chapters like these: Having a Baby Is Like Writing a Book?Lots of Whining, Begging, and Pushing Who Are These Kids, and Why Are They Calling Me Mom? I Finally Got My Head Together?Then My Body Fell Apart We Started Out With Nothing?and Still Have Most of It Left Leaking Laffs Between Pampers and Depends is a heart-warming ride over the waves of humor in God's endless sea of love.