From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment. So how do these successful academics write, and where do they find the “air and light and time and space,” in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines, their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection? Sword identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence; Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity and pleasure. Building on this “BASE,” she illuminates the emotional complexity of the writing process and exposes the lack of writing support typically available to early-career academics. She also lays to rest the myth that academics must produce safe, conventional prose or risk professional failure. The successful writers profiled here tell stories of intellectual passions indulged, disciplinary conventions subverted, and risk-taking rewarded. Grounded in empirical research and focused on sustainable change, Air & Light & Time & Space offers a customizable blueprint for refreshing personal habits and creating a collegial environment where all writers can flourish.

In elegant, precise prose Donald Antrim crafts funny, tender stories of men and women disorientated by love, loss, and bouts of sorrow. An unfaithful husband goes out to buy flowers for his wife, while across town a new couple, both survivors of difficult childhoods, find comfort together in other people's apartments. On the edge of a university campus, a group of students are brought together by their ageing drama professor, whose predilection for pot and crush on his star pupil threaten to tip their performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream into a surreal and dangerous farce. And in the title story, a bereaved art teacher drives into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia intending to throw away his ex-girlfriend's paintings.

A trailblazer for women photographers in the South, North Carolina's Bayard Wootten (1875-1959) overcame economic hardship, gender discrimination, and the obscurity of a small-town upbringing to become the state's most significant early female photographer. This advocate of equality for women combined an artistic vision of photography with determination and a love of adventure to forge a distinguished career spanning half a century. Originally trained as an artist, Wootten worked in photography's pictorial tradition, emphasizing artistic effect in her images at a time when realistic and documentary photography increasingly dominated the medium. Traveling throughout North Carolina and surrounding states, she turned the artistry of her eye and lens on the people and places she encountered. Having opened a studio in her hometown of New Bern in 1905, Wootten moved to Chapel Hill in 1928, where her clients included the University of North Carolina. Between 1932 and 1941, she also provided photographs for six books--including Cabins in the Laurel, Old Homes and Gardens of North Carolina, and Charleston: Azaleas and Old Bricks--lectured extensively, and exhibited her photographs as far away as New York and Massachusetts. Light and Air features 190 illustrations, including 136 duotone reproductions of Wootten's photographs taken in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee--many of which have never before been published. Though she was an accomplished landscape and architectural photographer, some of Wootten's most notable images were the portraits she crafted of black and white Americans in the lower reaches of society, working people whom other photographers often ignored. These images are perhaps her most enduring legacy.

It is widely acknowledged that there is an urgent need to transform our housing stock to a better energy performance level. However, improving energy performance should not result in a negative impact on the health, wellbeing and the comfort of building occupants. There are many energy-neutral features that can be incorporated at small or zero cost which have a positive effect on wellbeing. This book aims to outline and discuss these aspects of building design. The issue of health and wellbeing has already entered into design advice for the workplace, where productivity and absenteeism are often used as indicators. This book concentrates on residential buildings, notably mass housing and affordable strategies, for which new, more socially and health-oriented indicators are being developed. Provides practical design guidance based on scientific evidence Explores both physical and psychological wellbeing Focuses on the home and immediate domestic environment Structured in an accessible way for architects and designers.

This groundbreaking book examines the relationship between the modernist architecture of the 1920s and 1930s and that eras preoccupations with health, cleanliness, fresh air and sunshine, exploring how utopian notions of the clean machine and the hygienist movement inspired the pure geometric forms and sparkling surfaces of early modernist buildings. Anyone with an interest in architecture and/or modernism will find this original approach to a popular theme both engaging and enlightening.

Explains such natural phenomena as rainbows, mirages, iridescent clouds, and halos for the scientist and the artist

Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write. Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword’s analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.

Pioneers, troublemakers, discoveries. The resort of Arosa became a world-renowned research centre. This book tells the story of the world's longest series of ozone measurements and the Earth's vital protective envelope. Where the Grandhotel Tschuggen now stands in Arosa was once the Arosa Sanatorium. In those days thousands travelled to the resort to recover from tuberculosis, a disease that was widespread at the time. The German physicist Paul Götz launched his career on the roof of the sanatorium. At the request of the Arosa Resort and Tourism Association (Kur- und Verkehrsverein Arosa) he established the Light Climatic Observatory LCO (Lichtklimatisches Observatorium LKO) in 1921 to provide scientific validation of Arosa's reputation as a high altitude health resort. To this end Götz studied solar radiation, in which the ozone layer in the atmosphere played an important role. This gave rise to the world's longest series of ozone measurements, and it remains important for international research to this day. The observatory only survived for just under a century thanks to the strong personalities of those involved. Since 1988 it has been run by MeteoSwiss. This richly illustrated book chronicles some of the history of research and the environment. It considers the pioneers of ozone research and looks at the current risks caused by the hole in the ozone layer and climate change. The book tells the story in chronological order, but each chapter can be read in isolation.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Danish and German artists studying in Paris and Rome brought back the concept of "plein air" painting and began to paint out-of-doors on their native soil. They introduced a whole new aesthetic that was sensitive to the light and atmospheric conditions peculiar to the north, especially during the long summer days. This beautiful book focuses on the painters and paintings of this period, particularly Caspar David Friedrich, who produced many fine works before he developed the romantic style for which he is better known. The book presents topographical landscapes, panoramas, and some group and individual portraits that often include a window from which light emanates. Essays by eminent authorities discuss various aspects of the Danish and North German open air movement. They note, for example, that the paintings reflect a direct view of nature devoid of the intellectual and moral overtones of the neoclassical paintings that preceded them. They also discuss the fact that Schleswig Holstein was closely allied with Denmark until 1848, and this favored many Hamburg and north German artists studying at the Academy in Copenhagen where painting out of doors was encouraged. In addition to the essays, the book presents 108 works by twenty-three artists, catalogue entries for each work, and a biography of each artist.