National Network for Equitable Library Service

In the very near future, “smart” technologies and “big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such “solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vices in disguise?

In this unique new history of the world's most ubiquitous language, the foremost expert on linguistics David Crystal draws on the 100 words that best illustrate the huge variety of developments and events that have shaped our vernacular since the first definitively English word was written down in the fifth century.

This work evaluates the costs of low priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing. Until recently, she was a typical American consumer. She had grown accustomed to shopping at outlet malls, discount stores like T.J. Maxx, and cheap but trendy retailers like Forever 21, Target, and H&M.

The study of everyday life is fundamental to our understanding of modern society. This book provides a coherent, interdisciplinary way to engage with everyday activities and environments. Arguing for an innovative, ethnographic approach, it uses detailed examples, based in real world and digital research, to bring its theories to life. Sarah Pink focuses on the sensory, embodied, mobile, and mediated elements of practice and place as a route to understanding wider issues.

Mary Manjikian s Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End advances the thesis that only those who feel the most safe and whose lives are least precarious can engage in the sort of storytelling which envisions erasing civilization. Apocalypse-themed novels of contemporary America and historic Britain, then, are affirmed as a creative luxury of development.

Through a careful examination of the work of the canonical nineteenth-century novelists, Mike Davis traces conspiracies and conspiratorial fantasy from one narrative site to another.

This popular textbook provides the reader with an indispensable guide to criminological theory. It sympathetically outlines the principal theories of crime and rule-breaking, placing them in their European and North American contexts, confronting major criticisms that have been voiced against them, and constructing defences where appropriate.

"Nothing seems more far removed from the visceral, bodily experience of emotions than the cold, rational technology of the Internet. But as this collection shows, the internet and emotions intersect in interesting and surprising ways. Internet and Emotions is the fruit of an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars from the sociology of emotions and communication and media studies. It features theoretical and empirical chapters from international researchers who investigate a wide range of issues concerning the sociology of emotions in the context of new media.

In a gripping reconnaissance into the urban future, Mike Davis, a provocative interpreter of the American metropolis unravels the secret history of disaster, real and imaginary, in Southern California and shows how these tragedies could have been avoided.

Freud swore by it. Heidegger swore at it. Kierkegaard swore off it. In our everyday lives we can't live without it. It's just talk. Before media, before the Internet there was talk. We have monologues, conversations, chats, those funny little noises - uh-huh, yeah - that pad out exhanges. There are all kinds of talk, too - hearsay, gossip, psychobabble, quotation, talk that isn't quite right (talking animals, demonic possession) and talk that's great art.