Shortlisted for The Green Carnation Prize 2014 'This is not a fairytale. This is a story about how sex and money and power police our dreams.' Clear-eyed, witty and irreverent, Laurie Penny is as ruthless in her dissection of modern feminism and class politics as she is in discussing her own experiences in journalism, activism and underground culture. This is a book about poverty and prejudice, online dating and eating disorders, riots in the streets and lies on the television. The backlash is on against sexual freedom for men and women and social justice – and feminism needs to get braver. Penny speaks for a new feminism that takes no prisoners, a feminism that is about justice and equality, but also about freedom for all. It's about the freedom to be who we are, to love who we choose, to invent new gender roles, and to speak out fiercely against those who would deny us those rights. It is a book that gives the silenced a voice – a voice that speaks of unspeakable things.

From the visionary founder of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a manifesto for the dawning age of active materials Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world. Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future. Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider's perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. Contemporary events since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Uprisings have made Foucault’s essays on the Iranian Revolution more relevant than ever. Ghamari-Tabrizi illustrates how Foucault saw in the revolution an instance of his antiteleological philosophy: here was an event that did not fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian Revolution was precisely its ambiguity. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was not an effort to understand Islamism but, rather, his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies.

An exploration of the ways that shifting relations between materiality and language bring about different forms of politics in Tehran In Revolution of Things, Kusha Sefat traces a dynamism between materiality and language that sheds light on how the merger of the two permeates politics. To show how shifting relations between things and terms form the grounds for different modes of action, Sefat reconstructs the political history of postrevolutionary Iran at the intersection of everyday objects and words. Just as Islamism fashioned its own objects in Tehran during the 1980s, he explains, tyrannical objects generated a distinct form of Islamism by means of their material properties; everyday things from walls to shoes to foods were active political players that helped consolidate the Islamic Republic. Moreover, President Rafsanjani’s “liberalization” in the 1990s was based not merely on state policies and post-Islamist ideologies but also on the unlikely things—including consumer products from the West—that engendered and sustained “liberalism” in Tehran. Sefat shows how provincial vocabularies transformed into Islamist and post-Islamist discourses through the circulation of international objects. The globalization of objects, he argues, was constitutive of the different forms that politics took in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing distinct modes of agency. Sefat’s intention is not to alter historical facts about the Islamic Republic but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. By bringing the recent “material turn” into conversation with the canons of structural analysis, poststructuralist theory, sociolinguistics, and Middle East studies, Sefat offers a unique perspective on Iran’s revolution and its aftermath.

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats—a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as “circulating land”—to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions. “This is a quite brilliant, assertive book.” —Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement “Brilliant...What [Spang] proposes is nothing less than a new conceptualization of the revolution...She has provided historians—and not just those of France or the French Revolution—with a new set of lenses with which to view the past.” —Arthur Goldhammer, Bookforum “[Spang] views the French Revolution from rewardingly new angles by analyzing the cultural significance of money in the turbulent years of European war, domestic terror and inflation.” —Tony Barber, Financial Times

Takes readers on a historical journey with 12 engaging chapters about the American Revolution. With colorful spreads featuring the war's critical moments, key players, and lasting effects paired with interesting sidebars, questions to consider, and a timeline, the book provides a holistic view of the event.

From the far reaches of the human mind, come these tales of unrestrained, anti-authoritarianism. No government, no leaders, no authority, no rules, and complete freedom of action! Egoism, solipsism, anarchism, and other heresies -- now revealed to corrupt your mind!!! We don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows -- but we do need the likes of Claire Wolfe, whose book offers 101 suggestions to help grease the wheels as we roll towards the government's inevitable collapse. "Kill you TV... Join a gun-rights group... Fly the Gadsden flag... Buy and carry the Citizens" Rule Book... Join the tax protesters on April 15... Bury gold, guns, and goodies..". Wolfe's list is lengthy and thought-provoking, as she elaborates on each piece of advice, from generalities to precise instructions. For the concerned citizen who wishes to keep a low profile, protect his or her rights, and survive in the "interesting times" which are sure to come, this is essential reading.

More than anything else in your life or career, the way you manage your time will determine your success or failure. It's simple: The better you use your time, the more you will get accomplished, hence the more you will earn. The secret of successful people is to focus on the most important things on their to-do list and actually do them.

Grenada experienced much turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in an armed Marxist revolution, a bloody military coup, and finally in 1983 Operation Urgent Fury, a United States-led invasion. Wendy C. Grenade combines various perspectives to tell a Caribbean story about this revolution, weaving together historical accounts of slain Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the New Jewel Leftist Movement, and contemporary analysis. There is much controversy. Though the Organization of American States formally requested intervention from President Ronald Reagan, world media coverage was largely negative and skeptical, if not baffled, by the action, which resulted in a rapid defeat and the deposition of the Revolutionary Military Council. By examining the possibilities and contradictions of the Grenada Revolution, the contributors draw upon thirty years' of hindsight to illuminate a crucial period of the Cold War. Beyond geopolitics, the book interrogates but transcends the nuances and peculiarities of Grenada's political history to situate this revolution in its larger Caribbean and global context. In doing so, contributors seek to unsettle old debates while providing fresh understandings about a critical period in the Caribbean's postcolonial experience. This collection throws into sharp focus the centrality of the Grenada Revolution, offering a timely contribution to Caribbean scholarship and to wider understanding of politics in small developing, postcolonial societies.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution revolves around cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence. Little is certain about this new wave of innovation, which leaves industrialists and educators in the lurch without much guidance on adapting to this new digital landscape. Society must become more agile and place a higher emphasis on lifelong learning to master new technologies in order to stay ahead of the changes and overcome challenges to become more globally competitive. Promoting Inclusive Growth in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a collection of innovative research that focuses on the role of formal education in preparing students for uncertain futures and for societies that are changing at great speed in terms of their abilities to drive job creation, economic growth, and prosperity for millions in the future. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics including economics, higher education, and safety and regulation, this book is ideally designed for teachers, managers, entrepreneurs, economists, policymakers, academicians, researchers, students, and professionals in the fields of human resources, organizational design, learning design, information technology, and e-learning.