«La monetizzazione dell'attenzione ha trasformato il nostro panorama comunicativo in una terra di nessuno, dove le norme del buon senso non valgono più.» Ce ne accorgiamo ogni giorno: la distrazione è diventata una condizione cronica. Per strada ci imbattiamo in zombie al telefono, e a volte quegli zombie siamo noi. Al ristorante osserviamo il tavolo accanto in silenzio - quattro telefoni, nessuna parola - e poi sentiamo vibrare il nostro. Il confine tra pubblico e privato, un tempo netto - almeno in teoria -, si è dissolto: come scrive Chris Hayes, «con l'aiuto di alcune aziende tecnologiche, lo abbiamo praticamente abbattuto in meno di un decennio». Un radicale cambio di paradigma, in cui l'attenzione è diventata una risorsa da estrarre, gestire e mercificare, proprio come accadde al lavoro nel XIX secolo. «Le nostre strutture neurologiche più profonde,» sostiene Hayes «le eredità evolutive e gli impulsi sociali si trovano in un habitat progettato per predare, coltivare, distorcere o distruggere ciò che più fondamentalmente ci rende umani.» E il punto di non ritorno è vicino. 'Il canto delle sirene' ci guida in questo passaggio epocale, offrendo la visione d'insieme necessaria per riconoscere le dinamiche in atto e, forse, per tornare a scegliere a cosa prestare davvero attenzione: nelle nostre vite, nella nostra politica e nel nostro futuro.

A milestone publication of the late Christopher Gilbert's poetry, with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes

Lord, the anguish of my Black block rises up in me

like a grief. My only chance to go beyond being breach-

to resist being quelled as a bit of inner city entropy-

is to speak up for the public which has birthed me.

To build this language house. To make this case. Create.

This loving which lives outside time. Lord, this is time.
-from "Turning into Dwelling"

Christopher Gilbert's award-winning Across the Mutual Landscape has become an underground classic of contemporary American poetry. Now reissued and presented with Gilbert's never-before-published last manuscript written before his death in 2007,Turning into Dwelling offers new readers the original music and vision of one of our most inventive poets.

When Josie and her brothers uncover a haunted camera, the Mothman legend becomes a terrifying reality that threatens their entire town in this spooky and action-filled novel.

Josie may live in the most haunted town in America, but the only strange thing she ever sees is the parade of oddball customers that comes through her family's auction house each week. But when she and her brothers discover a Polaroid camera that prints pictures of the ghost of local recluse John Goodrich, they are drawn into a mystery dating back over a hundred years. A desperate spirit, cursed jewelry, natural disasters, and the horrible specter of Mothman all weave in and out of the puzzle that Josie must solve to break the curse and save her own life.

The astonishing story of one man’s breakneck race against time . . . and an implacable enemy.

An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid.

A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square.

A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard.

Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan.

A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.

One path links them all, and only one man can make the journey.

Pilgrim.

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another—from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to Major League Baseball—imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.
How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes upends well-worn ideological and partisan categories to offer a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top, leaving a new American elite more prone to failure and corruption and more out of touch with the people they govern.
Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times by arguing that the public's loss of trust in the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.

Character animation involves more than the principles of animation and the mechanics of motion. Unique, believeable characters that think, feel and captivate your audience are ones that involve emotion, performance, personality, acting and story. Successful animators balance all of these elements within a single character and narrative. With Acting and Performance for Animation, discover how to create dynamic, dramatic performances and believeable character interaction. An invaluable resource for animators, Acting and Performance for Animators is a practical guide to the variety of performance techniques relevant to animators. Develop believable character interactions with chapters detailing the principles of performance, performance types, character emotion and personality, physical and psychological performance, and scene composition. Analyze scripts, sound,acting, action and performance with the practical hints and tips, hands-on assignments and animated examples featured in an extensive guide for animators working in film, TV, games and commercials. Explore different performance techniques based upon the experiences of seasoned animators with case studies featuring John Lasseter, Ray Harryhausen, Nick Park, Joanna Quinn. Expand your own performance techniques with the accompanying website that features live action reference shorts, production stills, animated examples, and further hands-on assignments.

* Develop believable character interactions with chapters detailing the principles of performance, performance types, character emotion and personality, physical and psychological performance, and scene composition.

* Analyze scripts, sound, acting, action and performance with the practical hints and tips, hands-on assignments and animated examples featured in an extensive guide for animators working in film, TV, games and commercials.

* Explore different performance techniques based upon the experiences of seasoned animators with case studies featuring John Lasseter, Ray Harryhausen, Nick Park, Joanna Quinn and more.

* Features a website that features live action reference shorts, production stills, animated examples, and further hands-on assignments.

This book examines the small library of 24 books common to all Jewish and Christian Bibles—books that preserve the efforts of diverse writers over a span of many centuries to make sense of their personal experiences and those of their people, the ancient Israelites. Professor Christine Hayes guides her readers through the complexities of this polyphonous literature that has served as a foundational pillar of Western civilization, underscoring the variety and even disparities among the voices that speak in the biblical texts.

Biblical authors wrote in many contexts and responded to a sweeping range of crises and questions concerning issues that were political, economic, historical, cultural, philosophical, religious, and moral. In probing chapters devoted to each of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, Hayes reconstructs the meanings and messages of each book and encourages a deeper appreciation of the historical and cultural settings of ancient biblical literature.