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Large Language Models (LLMs), like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA, are not only the most disruptive and controversial technologies of our time, but also offer an unprecedented opportunity to examine human cognition and philosophically question the very nature of language, communication, and intelligence. What is consciousness? What is language? Are LLMs authors? Are LLMs the end of writing as we know it?In Communicative AI, Mark Coeckelbergh and David J. Gunkel offer a critical introduction to LLMs, investigating the philosophical significance of this technology and its practical ramifications. Mobilizing resources from contemporary philosophy, history of ideas, linguistics, and communication theory, the book invites us to re-think some long-standing philosophical issues concerning language, consciousness, truth, authorship, and writing. Through a blend of theoretical analysis, accessible explanations, and practical examples, the book provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the role that this powerful new technology is already playing in our lives.This is a must-read for students and scholars across the humanities and the social sciences, as well as for anyone intrigued by the intersection of technology, language, and human thought.

Not so long ago, Russia under Putin appeared to be a corrupt state run by an elite mainly interested in their own privileges and wealth: authoritarian but not fundamentally expansionist.The 2022 invasion of Ukraine made it clear that Putin is driven by far more than simply greed. Putin's Russia is, Andrei Kolesnikov argues, in the grip of intense ideological radicalization, seeking to mobilize its population in support of a form of chauvinistic neo-imperialism using increasingly totalitarian methods. This march towards "hybrid totalitarianism" is driven by a messianic view of Russia as a superior, "spiritual" form of "state-civilization" underpinned by its Orthodox faith and hatred of Western "decadence." Based upon a falsified version of history and a profound hostility to modernization, this ideology is making Russia an international pariah and condemning its citizens to endless war and economic stagnation. The only hope for redemption is a profound moral regeneration which redefines the nation's place in the world and embraces the spirit of democracy.This incisive analysis of the ideological dynamics of late Putinism, written by a leading Russian scholar and journalist, is an indispensable guide to understanding the country's recent descent into war-mongering barbarism.

In a lecture given in 2023, Byung-Chul Han likened his thinking to music: like the Goldberg Variations, his books present variations on themes, though in his case the variations are articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. He also explained that his thinking is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: 'If I may compare my thinking with a fruit, then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.'In the three lectures that make up this book, Han invites readers into his world, discusses some of the artists and thinkers who have shaped his thinking, and explores some of the central preoccupations of his work. 'If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears.' The more we immerse ourselves in digital communication, the more we lose the sense of touch and the physical presence of the Other. We become entangled in our own egos and become more and more depressed. We live in a society that is becoming increasingly narcissistic, in which individuals are turned in on themselves, incapable of relating to the Other in the way that Eros, as distinct from sex, requires.Wide ranging in scope and conversational in style, these lectures are an ideal introduction to one of the most influential philosophers and cultural theorists writing today.

They say everybody uses porn. They're wrong. People don't use pornography: it uses us. And you don't have to watch it to be one of its victims.In this thought-provoking and timely book, Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel expose how the multi-billion-dollar pornography industry has humanity gripped in a chokehold. From rewiring our brains and normalising sexual violence, to shaping new protest movements, the pornographic revolution has achieved a stunning and near-total victory.The triumph of the pornocrats is made more sinister by society's widespread acceptance that 'all men watch porn', the denial of its devastating harms, and a lack of political will to curb the power of the global pornography business.The authors answer the questions that politicians and policymakers are too scared to ask. Why, despite over half a century of feminist gains and lessons in schools on 'consent', do today's school children display more sexist attitudes than their parents and grandparents? Do women really want to be choked and humiliated in bed? How can we fight back and reclaim sex, love and relationships?Drawing on the latest research, Pornocracy charts how the neurological shifts caused by porn use reverberate through society. The book also warns of a dystopian future where AI-powered porn and sextech threaten to reduce us all to masturbating meat puppets on an algorithmic production line.Provocative and powerful, Pornocracy tells the story of how pornography fundamentally changed—perhaps forever—what it is to be human.

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but ‘the way’ (dao), which lacks the solidity and fixedness of essence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering. ‘A Zen monk should be without fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water’, said the Japanese Zen master Dōgen.Drawing on this fundamental distinction between essence and absence, Byung-Chul Han explores the differences between Western and Far Eastern philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and art, shedding fresh light on a culture of absence that may at first sight appear strange and unfamiliar to those in the West whose ways of thinking have been shaped for centuries by the preoccupation with essence.

Technology is conventionally viewed as dehumanizing. Yet, as Eva Illouz shows in this concise book, technology has become uniquely emotional, continuously tapping into and eliciting a great variety of emotions. From emojis, GIFs, and likes, to influencers, meditation apps, and virtual worlds, technology increasingly mimics and extends emotional life, turning feelings into quantifiable data and yielding extraordinary profits. Techno-capitalism, Illouz argues, no longer mines the soil, but extracts value from the self and subjectivity, transforming emotional energy into capital. This machinic intimacy between humans and technology integrates economy, culture, and psychology into one single matrix, making emotions into the new economic pipelines of techno-capitalism.The emotionalization of technology has profound effects: the loss of experience, loneliness crowded with vicarious interactions and leisure, and the replacement of reality by the performance of authenticity. Through a variety of examples, Illouz explores the mechanisms through which the emotional self has become the main economic resource of capitalism, a world where our feelings pass through machines and are manufactured, measured, and sold by them.

Gisèle Pelicot's story outraged the world. The sickening parade of crimes to which she was subjected and her betrayal are dark pages in our history. Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia decided to attend the trial and to analyse its resonance for our future. It became the trial that demonstrated that trials will never suffice to serve justice. If the perpetrators, for the most part, seemed so unashamed of what they had done, can we see in their sentencing anything meaningful? If their lawyers defend their clients by relieving them of responsibility for their actions, how will these men, their families, their friends see this trial as anything other than an injustice? If, even as the most explicit proof streamed before the court, the victim was stonewalled with the bland denial of facts, what can juries achieve in cases when the evidence is lacking? The threat of incarceration will never be powerful enough to stop men raping. If trusting the justice system, as those who fret about feminist overreach counsel us to do, gets us nowhere, what do we do?Above all, one question haunted Garcia: under such circumstances, can we live with men? And at what price?

A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life that is more than mere survival. Fear isolates people and closes them off from one another; hope, by contrast, unites people and forms communities. It opens up a meaningful horizon that re-invigorates and inspires life. It nurtures fantasy and enables us to think about what is yet to come. It makes action possible because it infuses our world with purpose and meaning. Hope is the spring that liberates us from our collective despair and gives us a future.In this short essay on hope, Byung-Chul Han gives us the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that pervades our world.Also available as an audiobook

Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right?Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book. Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn – where anything goes and only consent matters – are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust. While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint.This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.Also available as an audiobook narrated by the author.

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper penality" and "street penality."Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.

In the 1990s, a vision emerged of a frictionless world of globalization in which the West would become ever richer on the basis of a tech-based service economy, all underpinned by a rules-based liberal international order. It became the basis for the mainstream politics of centre-left and right.Philip Pilkington argues that this vision was always delusional and is now dying. It is based on a doctrinaire and unrealistic form of liberalism and has given rise to hollowed-out financialised economies and disintegrating societies that can barely even reproduce their population or meet their energy needs. The US and UK find themselves ill-equipped to compete with China and other non-liberal states within an emerging post-liberal order in which what really matters is industrial capacity, realpolitik and military strength. Only by abandoning our liberal delusions and advancing our own brand of hard-headed post-liberalism can the West survive.No clear-sighted observer of contemporary geopolitics can afford to miss this bracing diagnosis of the West’s malaise and bold agenda for renewal.Also available as an audiobook.

How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? What psychological differences now exist between women and men? How are masculinities and femininities made? And how is gender entwined in global politics and debates over trans issues?Raewyn Connell and Tristan Bridges – leading scholars of gender and inequality – answer these questions and more. Their updated revision provides a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to modern gender studies, covering empirical research from all around the world, in addition to theory and politics. As well as introducing the field, Gender: In World Perspective provides a powerful contemporary framework for gender analysis with a strong and distinctive global awareness. Highlighting the multidimensional character of gender relations, Connell and Bridges show how to link personal life with large-scale organizational structures, and how gender politics changes its form in changing situations.The fifth edition of this influential book brings the statistical picture of gender inequalities up to date, offering new, close-focus case studies of gender research. Like previous editions, it examines gender politics and global power relations, but with added discussion around contemporary issues of intersectionality, populism, and "anti-gender" politics, gender-based violence, trans struggles, and environmental change. It also speaks at the intimate level, about embodied gender and personal relationships.Gender: In World Perspective moves from personal experience to global problems, offering a unique perspective on gender issues today.

What if the state as we know it didn’t exist? Our air would be poisonous, our votes uncounted, and our markets dysfunctional. Yet across the world, in countries as diverse as Hungary, Israel, the U.K., and the U.S., attacks on the modern state and its workforce are intensifying. They are morphing into power grabs by self-aggrandizing politicians who attempt to seize control of the state for themselves and their cronies. What replaces the modern state once it is fatally undermined is not the free market and the flowering of personal liberty. Instead, the death of government agencies organized under the rule of law inevitably leads to the only realistic alternative: the rule of men.In The Assault on the State, political scientists Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein offer an impassioned plea to defend modern government against those who seek to destroy it. They dissect the attack on the machinery of government from its origins in post-Soviet Russia to the core powers of Western democracy. The dangers of state erosion imperil every aspect of our lives. Hanson and Kopstein outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend before humanity is plunged back into the pathological personalistic politics of premodern times.Also available as an audiobook.

'Populist' is now most commonly used as a term of abuse. Populists, we are repeatedly told, are xenophobic ignoramuses offering irrational, emotive solutions to complex problems. But is this true?Frank Furedi argues that this is a self-serving narrative that owes more to the desire of elites to protect their own power and interests than it does to the truth. The widespread disdain expressed towards populism in the media and by many academics is in fact poorly concealed contempt towards the idea of popular sovereignty and democratic decision-making. Populism is not equivalent to any specific ideology, as populist politicians vary greatly in their substantive views, but it is rather a broad disposition towards public life that stresses the value of giving the ordinary citizen a genuine voice in political decision-making. Attacks on 'populism' most commonly reveal the desire of those who run our institutions to keep real authority in the hands of unaccountable elites who veil their power under the guise of 'expertise'.This bracing defence of basic democratic values by one of our most fearless polemicists should be read by anyone who mistakes the complacent assurances of our elite for the wisdom of our betters.

An unconventional alliance has come to define the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has been building a sprawling web of regional allies – from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Shiite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza – all aimed at challenging what they see as a US-led regional order and Israel’s military supremacy. But, after decades of expansion, has this alliance – the Axis of Resistance – reached its breaking point?In this path-breaking book, leading foreign policy analyst Hamidreza Azizi traces the rise, transformation, and fragmentation of the Axis, from its roots in local resistance movements to its peak under Qasem Soleimani and its involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The network now faces an existential threat. As regional dynamics continue to unfold, Azizi situates the Axis in its broader ideological and strategic context and examines competing visions for regional order in the Middle East. The Axis of Resistance offers a vital guide to one of the most consequential and misunderstood political-military alliances in contemporary international affairs.

What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret—that is, to read—the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals. Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits. Freud was a product of the Father Age. He did a great deal to save it. The Catholic Church finally realized this. Lacan followed the way paved by Freud, but it led him to posit that the father is a symptom. He demonstrates that here using Hamlet as an example. What people have latched onto about Lacan's work—his formalization of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father—was merely his point of departure. Seminar VI already revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire’s course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines. This Seminar predicted “the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion.” We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us.

A defining feature of being human is our ability to think. We refer to ourselves, after all, as Homo sapiens. But in a world where experiencing and achieving as much as possible is the number one preoccupation, there is little room for reflection. Technology is also making everything easier, eroding the need for us to think at all.Of course deep, critical thinking can be difficult, sometimes painful, and it takes time. But it is fundamental to our well-being. In this new book, bestselling philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann argues for a return to the thoughtful life, where we learn to think well, to think deeply, to lose ourselves in reverie and tune in to our inner voice. By spending time in our thoughts and letting them wander freely, we will discover that thinking is one of the most enriching things we can do in life – and one of the most human, too.

Empire and race have become the most discussed – and most problematic – subjects in political and historical discourse. It is now an unquestionable orthodoxy both in academia and in progressive political discourse that European colonial empires – particularly the British – were uniquely evil, the West's 'original sin', and that their legacy continues to underpin systemic racism, injustice, and oppression.Marie Kawthar Daouda, a Moroccan and French academic who now lives in Britain, argues that this narrative is dangerously wrong. Weaving her personal experience with erudite reflection on history, literature, and politics, she argues that we are all heirs of complex waves of immigration, conquest, and colonization. A closer look at French and British history belies a simplistic worldview wherein all the evil in the world is the result of the peculiarly vicious nature of white, Western colonizers. Indeed, she argues, such a perspective nurtures the very prejudices it claims to fight by valorizing victimhood above individual or collective agency and by denying ethnic minorities any sense of responsibility.A coruscating attack on the perverse solipsism, moral blindness, and historical illiteracy of 'decolonizing' progressive elites, this book upends our tired debates over colonialism, empire, and immigration. It offers a more nuanced, hopeful vision of our historical self-understanding.

The work of Michel Houellebecq – one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time – is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation. Houellebecq found in Schopenhauer – the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope – a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecq’s first writings appeared in the early 1990s, the influence of Schopenhauer was everywhere apparent.  But it was only much later, in 2005, that Houellebecq began to translate and write a commentary on Schopenhauer’s work. He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017. Now available in English for the first time, In the Presence of Schopenhauer is the story of a remarkable encounter between a novelist and a philosopher and a testimony to the deep and enduring impact of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on one of France’s greatest living writers.

Colin Crouch argues that at the base of all political conflicts are struggles over which types of people should be included in and which excluded from various rights, including the right to exist at all within a particular society. This is more fundamental than any conflict between left and right or between classes, and it gives rise to tropes of inclusionary and exclusionary rhetoric that can be transferred across issues – from material inequality to ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, and including demands for nations to isolate themselves as much as possible from contacts with others.Today the forces seeking exclusions of many kinds are gaining ground in the strategies of many governments, parties and movements. Drives to exclude lead rapidly to the incitement of hatred, which leads in turn to acts of performative cruelty and physical violence.Deeply opposed as he is to the politics of exclusion, Crouch seeks to understand and explain its rationality. He passionately advocates a politics of inclusion but, at the same time, he recognises the real obstacles that a commitment to inclusion must confront. While not fully optimistic about how these struggles will play out in the coming years, he sees that there is a path through which campaigns for openness and welcome could still triumph in dark times.

Sollers once wrote that, to him, Claudel was first and foremost the man who wrote, "Paradise is around us at this very moment, all its forests attentive like a great orchestra that invisibly adores and implores. The whole invention of the Universe with its notes falling vertiginously one by one into the abyss where the wonders of our dimensions are written."Well, Lacan is, to me, the one who says in this Seminar, "We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life."Is that the same thing? No, I don't think so. Here there is no adoration, no invisible orchestra, no vertigo or wonders. Let us begin by the end: Lacan "evacuated" from the rue d'Ulm along with his audience, not without resistance or an uproar. The episode was in all the papers. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He had spoken not only to psychoanalysts, but also to young people who were still fired up by the events of May 1968, who nevertheless accepted him as a master of discourse at the same time as they dreamt of subverting the university system. What did he tell them? That "Revolution" means returning to the same place. That knowledge now imposes its law on power and has become uncontrollable. That thought is censorship itself. He spoke to them about Marx, but also about Pascal's wager — which became in his hands a new version of the master/slave dialectic—not to mention the foundations of set theory. He moved on to a discussion of perversion, and models of hysteria and obsession. All of that is connected, scintillates, and captivates.Between the lines, the dialogue between Lacan and himself continues regarding the subject of jouissance and the relationship between jouissance and speech and language.

In this second volume of his groundbreaking new work on the history of philosophy, Jürgen Habermas traces the development of Western thought from the reception of Platonism by early Christian thought, through the revolution in medieval philosophy and theology triggered by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, up to the decoupling of philosophical and theological thought in nominalism and the Reformation that ushered in the postmetaphysical thinking of the modern age. In contrast to conventional histories that focus on movements and schools, Habermas takes the dialectic of faith and knowledge as a guiding thread for analysing key developments in the thought of major figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and Luther that constitute milestones in the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking. A distinctive feature of Habermas’ approach is the prominence he accords practical philosophy, and in particular legal and political ideas, and the corresponding attention he pays to social, institutional and political history, especially as these bear on the relationship between church and state. As a result, the central preoccupations of Christian thought are shown to be original responses to questions raised by the Christian worldview that exploded the framework of Greek metaphysical thinking and remain crucial for the self-understanding of contemporary philosophy. Far from raising claims to exclusivity, completeness or closure, Habermas’s history of philosophy, published in English in three volumes, opens up new lines of research and reflection that will influence the humanities and social sciences for decades to come.

Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. In Anxiety, now available for the first time in English, he explores the nature of anxiety, suggesting that it is not nostalgia for the object that causes anxiety but rather its imminence. In what was to be the last of his year-long seminars at Saint-Anne hospital, Lacan's 1962-63 lessons form the keystone to this classic phase of his teaching. Here we meet for the first time the notorious a in its oral, anal, scopic and vociferated guises, alongside Lacan’s exploration of the question of the 'analyst's desire'. Arriving at these concepts from a multitude of angles, Lacan leads his audience with great care through a range of recurring themes such as anxiety between jouissance and desire, counter-transference and interpretation, and the fantasy and its frame.This important volume, which forms Book X of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, will be of great interest to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences, from literature and critical theory to sociology, psychology and gender studies.

For nature and the climate, the only thing more dangerous than war is peace – this is the startling claim made by the French philosopher Pierre Charbonnier in his new book War Ecology. Charbonnier shows that we are the heirs of an intellectual and political history which maintained that creating the conditions for peace between human beings requires exploiting nature, exchanging resources and providing sufficient prosperity for all.This idea, which can be traced back to the eighteenth century, found striking expression in the mid-twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the development of fossil fuel infrastructures was combined with a pacifist and universalist discourse that sought to undermine the causes of war by liberating productivity. So peace, or the balance of great powers established by the United States, is largely a gift of fossil fuels, particularly oil. The fact that the climate crisis continues to gather pace today, with little effective intervention, is due not simply to a lack of political will: it also stems from the fact that the modern system of state legitimacy is rooted in the ability of each state to guarantee prosperity for its citizens, a guarantee backed up by a regime of cheap energy.In the twenty-first century, argues Charbonnier, this paradigm has become obsolete, since we must both guarantee peace and security and respect planetary limits – in other words, learn to make peace without destroying the planet. It is in this context that the possibility of a war ecology is emerging, according to which sustainability and security no longer appear as contradictory injunctions but converge in the need to move towards a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.This highly original work will be of interest to a wide readership in social and political theory, philosophy, politics, environmental studies, war and peace studies and the social sciences and humanities generally, as well as anyone concerned about war, conflict and the climate crisis.

The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself to daily gardening in all weathers. For Han, gardening is a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It gives you a different sense of time. Every plant has its own time that is specific to it, and the garden is a space in which these multiple temporalities overlap and cut across one another. The longer he worked in the garden, the more respect he developed for the earth and for its enchanting beauty.Gardening taught him what care for others means. Each organism has its own consciousness of time passing; each organism lives in its own micro-universe. Step by step, Han receded from himself and the world, moving closer and closer to an exuberant, divine nature which we are increasingly in danger of losing.Through this rich meditation on plants, soil, gardening, and time, Han unfolds a way of relating to and tending the earth that is in sharp contrast to the brutal, incessant exploitation of our planet that we see all around us today.

What is time? Does it exist? Can it be stopped? Can time's arrow be reversed? Can we ever free ourselves from the seemingly inexorable flow of time? Chronos is a mystery, and not only for us: it was a mystery for our distant ancestors too.In this book, Guido Tonelli guides us along the path to understanding a reality that is very different from what we believe it to be. Modern science allows us to explore the deepest recesses of the universe, and when we observe the giant objects which inhabit the cosmos over great distances – galaxies and clusters of galaxies – time acquires characteristics which are quite different from those that we are used to. The same happens when we analyse the phenomena which occur on a sub-nuclear scale. In these two worlds which are so far apart from one other, the harmonious and constant flow of time which has enchanted us for millennia twists, melts and shatters. Space and time appear as an indissoluble couple – not some abstract concept but a material substance which occupies the entire universe, which vibrates, oscillates and is in a constant process of change.With Tonelli's erudite assistance, we discover the long history of time, its violent birth and strange evolution. In our imaginations, we travel to terrifying places where time stops and explore the close link which binds time to energy. This is a bewildering journey that forces us to discard our preconceptions and abandon all certainty, a journey in which myth, art and philosophy will come to our aid when our minds begin to falter.

From its obscure mid-twentieth-century origins in clinical assessments of intersex individuals, "gender identity" – understood as an inner sense of self that may or may not align with one's natal sex – has become central to the public and private culture of selfhood throughout the Western world. The category has been enacted in laws and regulations, encoded in organizational policies and routines, and embedded in everyday ways of thinking and talking. It has introduced a novel principle of social classification, created new possibilities for personhood, and come to rival or redefine the category of sex itself.These developments have provoked intense controversy. Disputes rage about the legitimacy of medical interventions for gender-dysphoric youth, the meaning and limits of gender self-determination, and the terms governing access to women's spaces and activities.Rogers Brubaker treats this hot topic in a cool manner, bringing much-needed analytical distance and conceptual clarity to a discussion dominated by polemics. Renowned for his foundational analyses of basic social categories, Brubaker sidesteps intractable debates about what gender identity ultimately is in order to show how the category actually works in medicine, law, data-gathering, and education. And he challenges prevailing understandings by demonstrating that despite its obvious instrumentalization by the right, most spectacularly in the US, the controversy over gender identity cannot be understood solely through a left–right lens.Wide-ranging and rigorous, this book will inject a healthy dose of reason into one of the most troubled and acrimonious debates of our time.

How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? What psychological differences now exist between women and men? How are masculinities and femininities made? And how is gender entwined in global politics and debates over trans issues?Raewyn Connell and Tristan Bridges – leading scholars of gender and inequality – answer these questions and more. Their updated revision provides a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to modern gender studies, covering empirical research from all around the world, in addition to theory and politics. As well as introducing the field, Gender: In World Perspective provides a powerful contemporary framework for gender analysis with a strong and distinctive global awareness. Highlighting the multidimensional character of gender relations, Connell and Bridges show how to link personal life with large-scale organizational structures, and how gender politics changes its form in changing situations.The fifth edition of this influential book brings the statistical picture of gender inequalities up to date, offering new, close-focus case studies of gender research. Like previous editions, it examines gender politics and global power relations, but with added discussion around contemporary issues of intersectionality, populism, and "anti-gender" politics, gender-based violence, trans struggles, and environmental change. It also speaks at the intimate level, about embodied gender and personal relationships.Gender: In World Perspective moves from personal experience to global problems, offering a unique perspective on gender issues today.

Once there were princes and peasants and very few between. The extremes of wealth and poverty are still with us, but that shouldn't blind us to the fact our societies have been utterly transformed for the better over the past century. As Daniel Waldenström makes clear in this authoritative account of wealth accumulation and inequality in the modern west, we are today both significantly richer and more equal.Using cutting-edge research and new, sometimes surprising, data, Waldenström shows that what stands out since the late 1800s is a massive rise in the size of the middle class and its share of society's total wealth. Unfettered capitalism, it seems, doesn’t have to lead to boundless inequality. The key to progress was political and institutional change that enabled citizens to become educated, better paid, and to amass wealth through housing and pension savings. Waldenström asks how we can consolidate these gains while encouraging the creation of new capital. The answer, he argues, is to pursue tax and social policies that raise the wealth of people in the bottom and middle rather than cutting wealth of entrepreneurs at the top.Richer and More Equal is a benchmark account of one of the most profound and encouraging social changes in human history and a blueprint for continued progress.