Bøker utgitt av The University of Chicago Press

"Reconsidering the limits-past, present, future-of the financial institutions that stand between us and the abyss. Two financial crises in two decades have expanded and diversified the roles of central banks in the twenty-first century. With the 2008 crash, they became the lenders of last resort in monetary policy; with Covid-19, they became underwriters of the public welfare. Both powers are expansive, unchecked, and inherently political. Is this democracy? In Balance of Power, economist and historian âEric Monnet traces the rise of the central banks-from their public-private origins to their current portfolio, which spans everything from interest rates to international relations-to make an urgent and erudite argument: the central banks are no longer independent, if they ever were. And our ability to subject them to democratic rule will go a long way in wielding their expansive powers effectively in societies that face multiple crises at once. Eschewing the traditional storytelling around the birth of central banks and their operational independence, Monnet shows how the power of central banks flows from their origins as a part of the welfare state: they were the financial apparatus used to stabilize societies after World War II, and they have never abdicated that role since. Today it can be seen in the central banks' role as insurance providers-the backstop institution of bailouts, stimuli, and rescue plans. As new challenges emerge, including the boom of digital currencies and the simmering crisis of climate change, central banks will necessarily have to break the glass on longstanding taboos of monetary policy. With this creeping expansion well underway, Monnet offers a trenchant, deeply erudite case for what a democratic central bank can look like"--

"The interior of Antarctica is an utterly pristine wilderness; a desolate landscape of ice, wind, and rock; a landscape so unfamiliar as to seem of another world. This place is known to only a handful of early explorers and the few scientists fortunate enough to have worked there. Edmund Stump is one of the lucky few. Having climbed, photographed, and studied more of the Transantarctic Mountains than any other person on Earth, this geologist is uniquely suited to offer this stunning visual tour of Antarctica. With stories of Stump's journeys and science, the book contains some 130 color photographs from his 40 years of work on the world's most isolated continent, all complemented by watercolors and sketches by scientific illustrator Marlene Hill Donnelly. Over three chapters-on the ice, the rock, and the wind-we meet snowy paths first followed during Antarctica's Heroic Age, climb the central spire of the Organ Pipe Peaks, peer into the crater of the volcanic Mt. Erebus, and traverse Liv Glacier on snowmobile, while avoiding fatal falls into hidden crevasses. Along the way, we see the beauty of granite, marble, and ice-cored moraines, meltwater ponds, lenticular clouds, icebergs and glaciers. All seems both permanent and precarious, connecting this otherworld to our fragile own"--

A revelatory and comprehensive history of the gay Right from incisive political commentator Neil J. Young. ? One of the most maligned, misunderstood, and even mocked constituencies in American politics, gay Republicans regularly face condemnation from both the LGBTQ+ community and their own political party. Yet they've been active and influential for decades. Gay conservatives were instrumental, for example, in ending "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and securing the legalization of same-sex marriage-but they also helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump. In Coming Out Republican, political historian and commentator Neil J. Young provides the first comprehensive history of the gay Right. From the 1950s up to the present day, Young excavates the multifarious origins, motivations, and evolutions of LGBTQ+ people who found their way to the institutions and networks of modern conservatism. Many on the gay Right have championed conservative values-like free markets, a strong national defense, and individual liberty-and believed that the Republican Party therefore offered LGBTQ+ people the best pathway to freedom. Meanwhile, that same party has actively and repeatedly demonized them. With his precise and provocative voice, Young details the complicated dynamics of being in-and yet never fully accepted into-the Republican Party. Coming Out Republican provides striking insight into who LGBTQ+ conservatives are, what they want, and why many of them continue to align with a party whose rank and file largely seem to hate them. As the Republican Party renews its assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, understanding the significant history of the gay Right has never been more critical.

"A philosophical exploration of the value of aesthetics in loss and grieving. Loss and grief are destabilizing forces. As a bereaved person grapples with the reality that their loved one is gone and feels only shakily connected to the surrounding world, the tangibility of sensory objects can be grounding. In Aesthetics of Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins highlights the role of aesthetics in the grieving process, offering a guide for how being attuned to aesthetics can aid those experiencing loss. While some activities associated with loss-such as participation in funerals-are culturally scripted, many others are relatively everyday, including attending to sensory objects, telling stories, reflecting on artworks, experiencing music, and engaging in creative projects. Higgins shows how attending to these aesthetic practices helps those who have experienced loss, and she also sheds light on the importance of aesthetic engagement with the world for individual and community flourishing"--

"In this short handbook, an award-winning science communicator and teacher offers a quick guide for scientists and engineers who want to communicate-and better understand-their research by designing compelling graphics for journal submissions, grant applications, presentations, and posters. Distilling her celebrated books and courses to the essentials, Felice C. Frankel shows scientists and engineers the importance of thinking visually. This crucial volume in the Visual Elements series offers a wealth of engaging design examples--including case studies and advice from designers at prestigious outlets from The New York Times to Nature. Ideal for researchers who want a foothold for presenting and preparing their work for conferences and publications, the book explains the steps for creating a concise and communicative graphic to highlight the most important aspects of research. With clear before-and-after examples, Frankel shows how color, composition, layering, and other design details help researchers to communicate more effectively. The resulting book is an essential element of any scientist's, engineer's, or science communicator's library"--

"Of all the aspects of making a book, design is perhaps the most mysterious. Authors and readers surely realize that covers are designed objects that, like it or not, books are commonly judged by. But a book's interior is also the product of a designer's careful attention to such matters as where the page numbers go or how wide the margins are. Even publishing professionals-editors, agents, marketing staff-often have only the vaguest idea of how designers use type, color, space, and other elements to turn manuscripts into visually distinctive and compelling books. This is the first book that explains what designers do for the benefit of all the 'word people' involved in making (and enjoying) books. By demystifying how she and her fellow design professionals approach their tasks, Debbie Berne seeks to make authors and publishing colleagues informed partners in design decisions and to ensure the process is collaborative from start to finish. She considers self-published as well as traditionally published authors in her advice. And along the way, she offers delightful reflections on how each part of a book functions and how they ideally come together as a package for the ultimate benefit of the reader"--

"In 2022, Los Angeles became the US city with the largest population of unhoused people, a stark contrast with the city's luxurious hillside mansions. This book from sociologist Neil Gong traces the divide between the haves and have nots by looking to mental health treatment, a key factor in what kind of life a person can live. As Gong shows, the mental health options available to the wealthy versus the poor affects not only the resources they can access, but their very personhood. The Downtown Skid Row area is infamous as "America's homeless capital"-a dumping ground for people with mental illness, ex-prisoners, and addicts. For people diagnosed with mental illness who get caught in the social safety net, often through arrests, the state will largely offer a slate of outpatient tactics. Caseworkers visit individuals regularly to help them with the necessities of functioning independently, such as obtaining identification and shopping for groceries. These services often keep mentally ill people housed, fed, and hopefully out of prison, but they rarely offer treatment for people in psychological distress. They are free but not treated. Across town in West LA or the beach cities, wealthy people diagnosed with serious mental illness attend luxurious treatment centers, from outpatient day clinics to residential programs by the ocean. Programs may offer yoga, holistic care, and farm-to-table organic meals alongside therapeutic treatments and university-affiliated psychiatrists. These treatments aim for psychological wellness, of course, but they also aim to stabilize people's lives, often through programs that greatly limit choice and mobility-families of the wealthy mentally ill expect that their loved ones will be contained. They are treated but not free. Throughout, Gong shows us starkly different ways of understanding people in psychic distress, and divergent ideas and pathways of recovery that may make them into separate kinds of people. At its core, this book project is about the way social context shapes problems and attempts to solve them. The book moves beyond psychiatric care to address issues of urban policy, family dynamics, and, ultimately, the meaning of freedom and personhood in contemporary America"--

The latest volume in the Metropolitan Museum Journal series. Founded in 1968, the Metropolitan Museum Journal is a blind, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published annually that features original research on the history, interpretation, conservation, and scientific examination of works of art in the Museum's collection. Its scope encompasses the diversity of artistic practice from antiquity to the present day. The Journal encourages contributions offering critical and innovative approaches that will further our understanding of works of art.

"Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction. Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them"--

"Tracy Fuad's second collection of poems, PORTAL, documents a life in which even the most intimate experiences are mediated by the flattening interface of technology and a world in which language is no longer produced solely by humans but by artificial intelligences as well. The poems circle the topics of replication, reproduction, and inheritance, and the way these processes are born out in language, history, and biology. In these poems, a baby is born; the world shrinks into tiny pockets under the new logic of contagion; two people are wed; the roses which washed up ashore centuries ago are blooming up and down the cape. All of this is set against a backdrop of ecological ruin, of decimated chestnut trees and a beached baby whale. The collection mirrors the restless spirit of the present, shifting between voices and forms. At times the poems take the form of experimental essays, and elsewhere the sonnet is reimagined and reinvented as a disembodied voice from the distant future. A portal can be a way out or a way in-or a website at the center of many networked websites. These poems take delight in the strangeness of contemporary life, even as they grieve something intangible which has been lost"--

"This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the premodern Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to many practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The material is remarkable and varied, and the author draws on a vast range of manuscript material across Europe and the Mediterranean, over a long span of time. Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons assembles ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Eastern Mediterranean. The author reveals how many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations and manuscript culture actually appear in premodern manuscripts. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration, than on the novel invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity. Griebeler's emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and sciences"--