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A global analysis of the effects of social security reforms on the retirement incentives and labor force trends of older workers. Employment among older men and women has increased dramatically in recent years, reversing a downward trend in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World examines how changing retirement incentives have reshaped labor force participation trends among older workers. The chapters feature country-specific analyses for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They find that while there is significant heterogeneity across countries, the reforms of recent decades have generally reduced the implicit tax on work at older ages. These changes correlate positively with labor force participation. The studies exploit the variation in the timing and extent of reforms of retirement incentives and employ microeconometric methods to investigate whether this correlation reflects a causal relationship. Policy changes appear to have contributed to rising labor force activity, but other factors like the role of women in the labor force, improved health, and changes in private pensions likely also play important roles.

A translation of the twelfth book of The Mah­­abharata, an epic tale of history and kingship, reinforced with legends, romances, and metaphysical, theological, and ethical teachings written in Sanskrit 1700 or more years ago. A remarkable composition of 100,000 couplets, The Mah­­abharata is the second-longest poem in world literature. In this volume, James L. Fitzgerald completes his translation of the twelfth of The Mah­­abharata's eighteen books, the vast Shanti Parvan, or The Book of Peace. Covering a wide range of ancient Indian intellectual history, The Book of Peace was intended to serve as a comprehensive, brahmin-inspired basis for living a Good Life in a Good Society in a Good Polity and is one of the most important and complex books of the poem. Fitzgerald's previous contribution to the Chicago edition of The Mah­­abharata was volume 7, which opened with Book 11, The Book of the Women, which movingly portrayed the grief of the wives, mothers, and sisters of the many warriors slain in the epic's central war narrative. The crises of grief presented in The Book of the Women give particular poignancy and depth to the shanti, or pacification, that is the theme of Book 12, The Book of Peace. Volume 7 included the first half of The Book of Peace, and volume 8 now completes it with the second half, which is focused particularly on the ways people can escape the cycle of rebirth and realize sublime beatitude by way of saving knowledge or yoga meditation or devotion to God Vi??u-Naraya?a. Supported by an extensive introduction and notes, this publication will be greeted as a major event in Sanskrit studies.

An updated edition of the essential guide for all scientists-from undergraduates to senior scholars-who want to produce prose that anyone can understand.   Scientific writing is often dry, wordy, and difficult to understand. But, as biologist and experienced teacher of scientific writing Anne E. Greene shows in Writing Science in Plain English, writers from all scientific disciplines can learn to produce clear, concise prose by mastering just a few simple principles. This short, focused guide presents roughly a dozen such principles based on what readers need to understand complex information, including concrete subjects, strong verbs, consistent terms, organized paragraphs, and correct sentence structure. Greene illustrates each principle with real-life examples of both good and bad writing and shows how bad writing might be improved. She ends each chapter with revision exercises (and provides suggested answers in a separate key) so that readers can come away with new writing skills after just one sitting. To help readers understand the grammatical terms used in the book, an appendix offers a refresher course on basic grammar.   For this second edition, Greene has incorporated the latest research on what makes writing effective and engaging and has revised or replaced exercises and exercise keys where needed. She has also added new features that make it easier to navigate the book. A new resource for instructors who use Writing Science in Plain English in their classes is a free, online teacher's guide. Drawn from Greene's long experience teaching students how to write science clearly, the teacher's guide provides additional lectures, assignments, and activities that will inform and enliven any class.

A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals-and why it's time to change the conversation about them.   If there's one thing most Americans can agree on, it's that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism's beard. Even liberals hate liberals-either because they can't manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they're so self-hating.   This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz's lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals-ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more-in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a "white liberal" is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.   Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less. With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited yet accessible voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand-and envision a way forward for-the complicated landscape of current US politics.

A new edition of a classic resource-comprised of twenty-three essays written specifically for this volume. First published nearly thirty years ago, Critical Terms for Religious Studies proved a vital resource for an emerging interdisciplinary conversation. We still use much of the same language in the study of religion, but fresh concerns have both changed their meaning and given rise to new terms altogether. This edition consists of twenty-three entirely new essays that offer students and scholars alike the tools to historicize and evaluate the shifting role of familiar and emerging critical terms in religious studies.            These are "critical terms" both because they are important in our cultural moment-identity, race, sex, catastrophe, power, and money-and because thinking through them reveals how religions are embedded in and shaped by material, social, economic, and political forces. A shared conviction unites contributors from a range of traditions and methodologies: a recognition that our world is saturated by the persistence of religious traditions as shape-shifting (not static or transcendent) forces of authority, as powerful today as ever before.

A collection of poems and photographs that take the foothills of Vermont's Green Mountains as a microcosm for considering climate change, borders, and community life.   In Dissonance, translator Kristin Dykstra's first book of original poetry, the author leads us to inner worlds shaped partly by the New England countryside, tracking shifts in the region's nature, infrastructure, and people, while sharing observations on borders and climate catastrophe that reverberate globally. Dykstra condenses signs of urban expansion, economic division, and battles over democracy into an innovative meditation. With a dynamic approach to form, musicality, and scope, Dissonance explores ways of experiencing regional landscapes and imagined communities in the twenty-first century.   Through her extended sequence of prose poems, photographs, and lyric fragments, Dykstra merges clips from documents and dialogues with observations drawn from two local libraries and her daily walks down a dirt road through Vermont's foothills. As she moves down this public road, which lies within the nation's federally designated hundred-mile border zone, she finds a daily convergence of tensions. Dissonance asks how poetry can unsettle impressions of a place, and how that process, in turn, disturbs impressions of self, of others, and of time itself.  Dissonance is the recipient of the third annual Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Multilayered lyric poems that resist systems of power and foster intimacy.   A previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, an inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, and a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk's meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric "I" and others, including poets, the speaker's partner, ancestors, and the reader, creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book's four sections of poems builds on one another to ask how we might form a collective-a people-not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.

A landmark account in words and pictures of Maori art, by Maori art historians-from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Maori artists. He toi whakairo, he mana tangata. Through artistic excellence, there is human dignity.   In six hundred pages and with over five hundred illustrations, this volume takes us on an extraordinary voyage through Maori art-from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists at the Venice Biennale, from whare whakairo to film, and from Te Puea Herangi to Michael Parekowhai.   Deidre Brown, Ngarino Ellis, and Jonathan Mane-Wheoki explore a wide field of art practices, including raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattooing), whakairo (carving), rakai (jewellery), kakahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media, and film. The works discussed span a period from the arrival of Pacific voyagers eight hundred years ago to the contemporary artists working around the world today. With expansive chapters and breakout texts focusing on individual artists, movements, and events, Toi Te Mana is an essential book for anyone interested in te ao Maori.

A thorough reassessment of how domestic factors do and do not constrain the use of American military force abroad in the early twenty-first century. More than two decades have passed since the September 11th terrorist attacks resuscitated debates about the "imperial presidency" within the United States. During that same time, the United States has fought costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pivoted to the Pacific to counter China, and pulled its gaze back to Europe and the Middle East in response to wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Moreover, new technologies and ways of funding and staffing wars have made the costs of war less visible to the public while polarization has increased and a new legal doctrine of presidential power has gained force. Against this backdrop, Checking the Costs of War reassesses how domestic factors have both constrained and failed to constrain the use of military power across different contexts and over time. Richly empirical chapters explore the varying effects of different kinds of potential checks: legislative, public opinion, and bureaucratic. Collectively, chapters offer new insight into the prospects for war and peace today.

A revelatory look at modern liberalism's historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.    Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, which widened its impact but narrowed its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of "professional class liberalism," and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals' egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional class liberals' power. The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism's place in contemporary American life.

A revelatory look at modern liberalism's historical evolution and enduring impact on contemporary politics and society.    Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, which widened its impact but narrowed its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of "professional class liberalism," and its central role in remaking electoral politics and the practice of governance. Across subjects as varied as philanthropy, consulting, health care, welfare, race, immigration, economics, and foreign conflicts, the authors examine not only the gaps between liberals' egalitarian aspirations and their approaches to policymaking but also how the intricacies of contemporary governance have tended to bolster professional class liberals' power. The contributors to Mastery and Drift all came of age amid the development of professional-class liberalism, giving them distinctive and important perspectives in understanding its internal limitations and its relationship to neoliberalism and the Right. With never-ending disputes over the meaning of liberalism, the content of its governance, and its relationship to a resurgent Left, now is the time to consider modern liberalism's place in contemporary American life.

Examines how stories of biblical families were reconfigured and projected in the genre of the oratorio, a form of sacred opera, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Based to a great extent on the Old Testament, the largely Catholic musical-dramatic genre was popular in Italy, Austria, and southern Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Biblical Families in Music reveals how difficult stories of fratricide, child sacrifice, death, and forbidden love performed a didactic function in oratorios, teaching early modern audiences about piety and the rules of proper family life. In the century after 1670, the heavily adapted tales of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, and the Egyptian slave Hagar and her son Ishmael were set to music by figures such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Sacchini and performed during Lent in churches and other sacred spaces for an audience of court nobility, clergy, and the urban patriciate. By examining the resonance of Catholic oratorios within predominantly upper-class social realities, the book broadens our cultural understanding of the early modern European family and underscores the centrality of family and familial relation to social position, devotional taste, and identity.

A thorough reassessment of how domestic factors do and do not constrain the use of American military force abroad in the early twenty-first century. More than two decades have passed since the September 11th terrorist attacks resuscitated debates about the "imperial presidency" within the United States. During that same time, the United States has fought costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pivoted to the Pacific to counter China, and pulled its gaze back to Europe and the Middle East in response to wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Moreover, new technologies and ways of funding and staffing wars have made the costs of war less visible to the public while polarization has increased and a new legal doctrine of presidential power has gained force. Against this backdrop, Checking the Costs of War reassesses how domestic factors have both constrained and failed to constrain the use of military power across different contexts and over time. Richly empirical chapters explore the varying effects of different kinds of potential checks: legislative, public opinion, and bureaucratic. Collectively, chapters offer new insight into the prospects for war and peace today.

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.   By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.   Incorporating Afshordi's cutting-edge research and insights from Halper's original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory's strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these theories. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community-all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.

An illustrated hourly guide that spotlights twenty-four flowers as they attract pollinators, resist predators, and survive our changing planet. Is it 4 am or chicory o'clock? In this short book, botanist and award-winning author Sandra Knapp walks us through a day in a global garden. Each chapter of Flower Day introduces a single flower during a single hour, highlighting twenty-four different species from around the world. Beginning at midnight in the Americas, we spot the long-tubular flowers of the moonflower, Ipomoea alba; they attract a frenzy of hawkmoths before the dawn arrives, and the flowers wither and collapse. As day breaks, dandelions and chicory open their heads-actually made up of many individual flowers tightly packed together-and flies and bees visit to get the energy they need to lay eggs and raise their young. Later, at eight o'clock in the morning, the sun rises over the watery Amazon basin, and we meet the giant waterlily, slowly turning from white to pink and purple. Trapped inside are the beetles who feasted on the flowers during the night. That evening, at seven o'clock, we travel to the Caribbean to smell night-blooming jessamine's powerful, some say nauseating, sweet scent. But this member of the nightshade family isn't just a thing of beauty-it has a reputation as both a poison and invasive species, crowding out endangered native trees.  For each hour in our flower day, celebrated artist Katie Scott has depicted these scenes with gorgeous pen and ink illustrations. Working closely together to narrate and illustrate these unique moments in time, Knapp and Scott have created an engaging read that is a perfect way to spend an hour or two-and a true gift for amateur botanists, gardeners, and anyone who wants to stop and appreciate the flowers.

The economic case for self-interest at the outer limits of being morally good. Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs. These tradeoffs-the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs-are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions. The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values-justice, freedom, beauty- in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits.

What economists know that we should know, translated for all of us.  Should I buy or rent? Do I ask for a promotion? Should I tell people I'm pregnant? What salary do I deserve? Should I just quit this job? Common anxieties about life are often grounded in economics. In an increasingly win-lose society, these economic decisions-where to work, where to live, even how to live-have a way of feeling fixed and mistakes terminal.   Daryl Fairweather is no stranger to these dynamics. As the first Black woman to receive an economics PhD from the famed University of Chicago, she saw firsthand how concepts of behavioral economics and game theory were deployed in the real world-and in her own life-to great effect. Hate the Game combines Fairweather's elite knowledge of these principles with her singular voice in describing how they can be harnessed. Her great talent, unique among economists, is her ability to articulate economic trends in a way that is not just informative, but also accounts for life's other anxieties.   In Hate the Game, Fairweather fixes her expertise and service on navigating the earliest economic inflection points of adult life: whether to go to college and for how long; partnering, having kids, both, or neither; getting, keeping, and changing jobs; and where to live and how to pay for it. She speaks in actionable terms about what the economy means for individual people, especially those who have the sneaking suspicion they're losing out. Set against her own experiences and enriched with lessons from history, science, and pop culture, Fairweather instructs readers on how to use game theory and behavioral science to map out options and choose directions while offering readers a sense of control and agency in an economy where those things are increasingly rare.

What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?   In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research a big question: why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren't what he expected. Unforgiving Places is Ludwig's revelatory portrait of gun violence in America's most famously maligned city.   Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic and others don't, Ludwig reveals gun violence in America to be more comprehensible-and more solvable-than our traditional approaches suggest.   Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig's immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including "countless hours in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's," Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn't require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

In this journey into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the text explores the physical aspects of human speech (ears, lungs, tongue) and the surrounding environment (buildings, landscape, climate), as well as social and political structures.