"Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals...

Serial Agencies investigates how public and academic reactions to The Wire have contributed to the narrative's serial evolution and cultural performance.

The western is arguably the most iconic and influential genre in American cinema. The solitude of the lone rider, the loyalty of his horse, and the unspoken code of the West render the genre popular yet lead it to offer a view of America's history that is sometimes inaccurate. For many, the western embodies America and its values. In recent years, scholars had declared the western genre dead, but a steady resurgence of western themes in literature,...

Argues that the awkwardness of our age is a key to understanding human experience.

A few years ago, globalism seemed to be both a known and inexorable phenomenon. With the end of the Cold War, the opening of the Chinese economy, and the ascendancy of digital technology, the prospect of a unified flow of goods and services and of people and ideas seemed unstoppable. Political theorists such as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that we had reached "the end of history." Yes, there were pockets of resistance and reaction, but these, we were...

"Belcaro - Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions" is an 1881 collection of essays on the subject of aestheticism written by Vernon Lee. Contents include: "The Book and its Title", "The Child in the Vatican", "Orpheus and Eurydice - The Lesson of a Bas-Relief", "Faustus and Helena - Notes on the Supernatural in Art", "Chapelmaster Kreisler - A Study of Musical Romanticists", "Cherubino - A Psychological Art Fancy", "In Umbria - A Study of Artistic...

Incisive insights into contemporary pop culture and its apocalyptic bent The world is going to hell. So begins this book, pointing to the prevalence of apocalypse - cataclysmic destruction and nightmarish end-of-the-world scenarios - in contemporary entertainment. In How to Survive the Apocalypse Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson examine a number of popular stories - from the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to the purging of innocence in Game...

This documentary tells the story of black metal. Part music scene and part cultural uprising, black metal rose to worldwide notoriety in the mid-nineties when a rash of suicides, murders, and church burnings accompanied the explosive artistic growth and output of a music scene that would forever redefine what heavy metal is and what it stands for to other musicians, artists and music fans world-wide. UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US goes behind the highly...

Pregnant men, paying stay-at-home moms, advertising, income tax deductions, people skills, boy books, speech codes, porn, god, testicular battery and tranquilizer guns, the Academy Awards, intelligent design and evolution... Philosophy with an attitude. Because the unexamined life is dangerous.

Michael 'DUZAC' Worrell is a graduate of the University of the Arts located in Philadelphia, PA. His novel, The Harmony of Humanity, is a fascinating story about a college student who uses art, science, spirituality and ancient wisdom to solve modern day problems. With profound vision the student creates a concept of humanity that expresses how life and nature entwine with the cycles of consciousness and the principles of the universe. The story proclaims...