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Are there degrees of coincidence? Is it poor hygiene to "double dip" a chip? Is it appropriate to say "God bless you" to a woman who sneezes if her husband does not? If you named a kid Rasputin, do you think that would have a negative effect on his life? For nine seasons, the Seinfeld gang engaged in argument and debate over such weighty matters of etiquette, leaving no stone unturned, no double-dipped chip ignored, no exposed nipple on a greeting card unexamined. But Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer were hardly the first to do this. In fact, they built their comedy around the sort of discussions we can find in the greatest collection of texts in the Jewish religion: The Babylonian Talmud. Like the eminent Rabbis of ancient Israel and Babylon, the Seinfeld gang spent their days poring over the excruciating minutiae of every single event imaginable. Seinfeld is the Jewish Talmud of a new generation. Thus does Jarrod Tanny bring you the The Seinfeld Talmud - Seinfeld as analyzed by the Sages of the Near East who gave us the illustrious Talmud, which, depending on whom you ask, is either the most comprehensive body of Jewish law ever produced or thousands of pages about nothing. This parodic take on Seinfeld through the lens of Jewishness will appeal to Seinfeld aficionados and anyone interested in the remarkable role Jewish culture has played in shaping American entertainment. Come join the masters of Judaic Law on their quest to master Seinfeld's domain.

From "I Like Ike" to razor-wire and National Guard troops ringing the U.S. Capitol, from Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes" to Brotha Lynch Hung's "Meat Cleaver," the United States has changed. Seven decades of material abundance and unprecedented technological advances have entwined with pronounced social and cultural fragmentation. What - and who - can explain this peculiar transformation of the land of the free and home of the brave? In From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling: Co-Starring Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol, Bill Clinton, the Supremes, and Barack Obama! Eric Rozenman takes readers on an often wry, but always substantive, journey through the past 65 years of American culture. The author provides first-hand accounts of key players and events. Presidents, prime ministers, dictators, rock stars, movie stars, survivors, protesters, and a Miss America all have their say. An FBI investigation of the author makes clear that those in charge didn't know the half of it. Bob Hope and Shirley Temple Black, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel are among those who paint the era's impressionistic portrait, by turns entertaining and tragic. Through a fast-moving series of vignettes, From Elvis to Trump highlights a nation and a time that concludes - brakes screeching before a STOP sign that was there all along - in unparalleled change and challenge.

Paul Heise's The Wound That Will Never Heal is an original allegorical reading of Richard Wagner's epic music drama The Ring of the Nibelung. The product of 50 years of scholarship, Heise challenges the standard view that Wagner merely dramatized the conflict between love and power and demonstrates instead that the composer's greatest work is an allegory exploring humanity's longing for transcendent value and that quest's paradoxical establishment of a science-based secular society. By employing a more extensive analysis of primary evidence than any prior interpretation, The Wound That Will Never Heal is the first interpretation to propose and sustain a global and conceptually coherent account of the entire Ring.

Franz Boas in Translation is the ultimate study of the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas and his work on the American Northwest. This groundbreaking study analyses what Boas did with local Native American legends passed down by the region's tribal groups. Three translations, originally published in 1888 and 1895, are presented here and constitute Boas's early attempts to define the cultural history of Pacific Northwest tribes. Using definitive plots, details, and incidents from a large collection of myths, comparative myths from other indigenous cultures, and a statistical method of multivariant analysis, Boas not only defined the historical relations of the regional tribes but also the role of diffusion in those relations.

Orthodox Christianity is one of the world's major religions, and the Russian Orthodox Church is by far its largest denomination. Few know its history and spiritual richness, however. Neil Kent's comprehensive new book fills that gap. The Russian Orthodox Church's Eastern roots, including its dogma, canons, and practices, are explored, along with the political and military contexts in which it carried out its mission over the centuries. Hemmed in between the Catholic powers of pre-Reformation Europe in the West, the Mongol steppe empires to the East, and the Islamic civilizations to the South, Russia and its Church found themselves in a difficult position during the Middle Ages. The Russian Orthodox Church's greatest strength was in the spiritual power of its liturgy, prayerfulness, icons, and monastic life. But even as the Church consolidated its authority under its own metropolitan, and later patriarch, it came into conflict with political rulers who sought to undermine it. After defeating foreign challenges, the Church underwent a painful reformation and schism, finally coming under government control. The Church survived this "Babylonian Captivity," and, in philosophical and spiritual terms, flourished under tsarist rule while still facing rising opposition. The fall of the monarchy in 1917 led to the Church's brief rejuvenation, but communist rule spelled relentless persecution with little respite at home and a lively émigré church carrying Russian traditions abroad. In post-Soviet times, however, the Church enjoyed an extraordinary resurrection and, benefiting from the spiritual richness and reunion with the Russian Orthodox Church abroad, once again became a spiritual pillar of the Russian people and a beacon of hope and Christian values, not only in Russia but anywhere it is currently practiced.

The Russian nobleman Ivan Ivanovich Pouschine is most recognized for two achievements: his leadership role in the 1825 Decembrist uprising agains Russia's tsarist government and his set of poignant memoirs about his dear friend Alexander Pushkin. Pouschine's historical and cultural significance, although often subtle, extends much further, however. After graduating from Tsar Alexander I's new Lyceum in 1817, Pouschine spent several years in the military and government service, serving as an officer and judge. All the while, he was an active leader of various secret societies in both St. Petersburg and Moscow that discussed the viability of a democratic government for Russia. He went on to become a key organizer of the resulting 1825 Decembrist uprising, for which he was sentenced to thirty years of harsh exile in Siberia. In exile, Pouschine involved himself in a variety of self-motivated pursuits: leading efforts to improve intellectual discourse in remote Siberia; managing the Decembrists' cooperative, and serving as the center of the exiles' social circle. In this book, Princeton scholar Anna Pouschine will explore her ancestor's correspondence by examining how his letters created personal fulfillment in a desolate environment at a difficult moment in his country's storied past.

In the 400 years since the first known execution was carried out for treason in Virginia, American jurisdictions have debated both the appropriateness and methods of capital punishment. Over that time, courts have placed varying restrictions on its application, excluding categories of citizens (for example the insane or the underaged) and evaluating and excluding methods of execution by the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment." Critics have highlighted controversial issues, including race and class, to argue against capital punishment's perceived uneven application. Others have argued that capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" in any form and should be outlawed altogether. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, in a 5-4 bare majority, that capital punishment is not cruel and unusual for the crime of murder, provided certain factors are also present. In the same decision it held that infliction of pain of during an execution did not bar its application. States remain free to employ the death penalty or not, and if so, choose freely the method each state deems most appropriate. In Capital Punishment in American Courts, distinguished political scientists James B. Whisker and Kevin R. Spiker survey this history from a penetrating new perspective.

In this innovative study, Colombian technology writer Mauricio Loza pursues an intriguing thesis on the origin of psychology and modern media, namely that they arise from the magical arts of the Renaissance, and it is there that we must seek what Ioan Culianu called "the prototype of the impersonal systems of the media, of indirect censorship, of global manipulation and of the trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses."The Hounds of Actaeon takes up Culianu's thesis to trace a history that unites such Renaissance luminaries as Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno with modern thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Guy Debord. It covers a broad historical and intellectual terrain ranging from the Renaissance magic, through eighteenth-century medicine and nineteenth-century psychology, to the propaganda and media warfare of the twentieth century, proving that the modern era, secular in appearance, continues to be profoundly influenced by pre-modern ways of thinking.The importance of this study is twofold: on the one hand it elaborates a fresh perspective on certain themes of Renaissance erotic magic and its relation to mass psychology and psychoanalysis, while, on the other, it offers an alternative for the study of the media strategies that determine Western worldviews and behaviors.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity's basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding. By mediating with a higher intelligence, we may be able to rediscover the inner logic of the age of intelligent machines.In The End of the Future, Stephanie Polsky conceives an understanding of the digital through its dynamic intersection with the advent and development of the nation-state, race, colonization, navigational warfare, mercantilism, and capitalism, and the mathematical sciences over the past five centuries, the era during which the world became "modern." The book animates the twenty-first century as an era in which the screen has split off from itself and proliferated onto multiple surfaces, allowing an inverted image of totalitarianism to flash up and be altered to support our present condition of binary apperception. It progresses through a recognition of atomized political power, whose authority lies in the control not of the means of production, but of information, and in which digital media now serves to legitimize and promote a customized micropolitics of identity management.On this new apostolate plane, humanity may be able to shape a new world in which each human soul is captured and reproduced as an autonomous individual bearing affects and identities. The digital infrastructure of the twenty-first century makes it possible for power to operate through an esoteric mathematical means, and for factual material to be manipulated in the interest of advancing the means of control. This volume travels a course from Elizabethan England, to North American slavery, through cybernetic Social Engineering, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the (neo)libertarianism of Silicon Valley in order to arrive at a place where an organizing intelligence that started from an ambition to resourcefully manipulate physical bodies has ended with their profound neutralization.

Alexandra Kitty's vital new book is a guide to the stratagems and techniques of war propaganda. When nations go to war, governments need reliable and effective methods of rallying public opinion to support their actions, regardless of the political leanings or educational background of citizens. The Mind Under Siege explores real life case studies and research in human motivation to show why propaganda is more powerful, potent, and effective than other types of persuasive messages. Reliance on primal phobias, and the threat to reproduction, well-being, and life itself make propaganda a reliable and powerful tool. For journalists and other news producers, Kitty's book shows how to ask the right questions and avoid spreading misinformation and propaganda and how to see more insidious forms of manipulation and narrative through psychological research and case studies.

The death of Spain's Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, on July 24, 1568, remains an enigma. Several accounts insinuated that the Spanish Crown Prince was murdered while incarcerated by order of his father, King Philip II. The mystery of Don Carlos's death, supported by ambassadorial accounts that implied foul play, became a fertile subject for defamation campaigns against Philip, fostering an extraordinary fluidity between history and fiction. This book investigates three treatments of the Don Carlos legend on which this fluidity had a potent, transformational impact: César Vichard de Saint-Réal's novel, Dom Carlos, nouvelle historique (1672), Friedrich Schiller's play, Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien (1787), and Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Don Carlos (1867). Through these cultural variations on a historical theme, the authors and composer contributed innovative elements to their genres. In The Don Carlos Enigma, the exciting young scholar Maria-Cristina Necula explores how the particular blend of history and fiction around the personage of Don Carlos inspired such artistic liberties with evolutionary outcomes. Saint-Réal advanced the nouvelle historique genre by developing the element of conspiracy. Schiller's play began the transition from the Sturm und Drang literary movement towards Weimar Classicism. Verdi introduced new dramatic and musical elements to bring opera closer to the realism of dramatic theatre. Within each of these treatments, pivotal points of narrative, semantic, dramatic, and musical transformation shaped not only the story of Don Carlos, but the expressive forms themselves. In support of the investigation, selected scenes from the three works are explored and framed by an engagement with studies in the fields of French literature, German theatre, French and Italian opera, and Spanish history. The enigma of the Spanish prince may never be solved, but Saint-Réal, Schiller, and Verdi have offered alternatives that, in a sense, unburden history of truth that it could never bear alone. In the case of Don Carlos, history is in itself an encyclopedia of variations.

The Devil and Dr. Fauci is an unsparing critique of what author James Driscoll calls the "Drug Testing, Licensing, and Marketing Complex," or DTLM. Quietly dominating America's healthcare industry, the DTLM poses threats comparable in magnitude, if not in character, to those of the Military-Industrial Complex. With a satiric scalpel reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's, Driscoll eviscerates the DTLM's avatar Dr. Anthony Fauci, our age's version of the archetypal Dr. Faustus. He exposes Fauci's pivotal position in the DTLM, at whose core is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA, Driscoll asserts, has long played Mephistopheles to Fauci's Faustus, with grave consequences for American healthcare. Dr. Driscoll's book is the first to upbraid the DTLM, FDA, and Fauci for exacerbating the Covid-19 crisis. Seeking to maximize profits from patentable vaccines, they rigorously suppressed off patent prophylaxis and treatment alternatives. This was but one of many DTLM follies that raised Covid's death toll and increased its socio-economic devastation. Other prominent follies were the mask posturing, arbitrary lockdowns, and closing of churches and schools that the DTLM and its political allies used to distract from their sacrifice of public health to their own agendas. We may never know if the Chinese deliberately released the Covid-19 virus, or if they created it. Yet the world now knows the destructive potential of gain of function technology. Similar epidemics or worse will strike us. To survive next time, we will need radical reforms in the FDA and transparency for the DTLM. But the opaque FDA bureaucracy, Driscoll concludes, is only one instance in our greater problem of deficient oversight within all of our increasingly powerful and ever less accountable federal bureaucracies.

What is "cancel culture." A new phrase in popular circulation for less than two years, it has provoked passionate denunciations from observers concerned with civil liberties, especially rights of free speech and expression, and apologetic defenses from opponents who advocate equity and accountability in light of new mores. Still others deny that "cancel culture" exists at all, while many claim never to have heard of it.¿In Cancel Culture: Tales from the Front Lines, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy presents a series of case studies that reveal the new phenomenon known as "cancel culture" as experienced or claimed in media, academia, the arts, public space, and other areas of ideological controversy. More than a bald denunciation or frustrated description of an unfamiliar new concept, this groundbreaking approach seeks to understand "cancel culture" as a process - how it starts and stops, where it comes from and leads, and how and, indeed, whether it might one day end. This penetrating and highly original analysis sheds light on a society grappling feverishly with fundamental issues of freedom and liberty.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented the world with unprecedented challenges. The effects on society have been comprehensive and affected every walk of life. In Pandemic Heroes and Heroines, Marguerite Bouvard offers the first book-length study of the pandemic's impact on one of the most vulnerable groups, front line medical workers charged with caring for the sick and providing general health and welfare.

In today's world, we must all be ready and informed about medical and security issues while traveling. Combining the expertise of three world experts in travel, health and safety, Lizard Bites & Street Riots: Travel Emergencies and Your Health, Safety, and Security is a compact resource certain to save lives, increase comfort, and generate peace of mind; besides which, it is a mighty exciting read. The key is preparation and prevention. Lizard Bites & Street Riots informs you, in a concise, practical, non-alarmist tone how to decrease your chances of drowning, getting caught in an avalanche, being in an airplane hijacking, or becoming the victim of identity theft. And then it reveals what to do if you are. It shows you how to handle hypothermia, abdominal pain, and malaria, among many other scenarios. Thoroughly revised for our times, it provides updates on emerging viral diseases, including Covid-19. The book's three distinguished authors know their business. Between them, they have covered the globe and managed travel emergencies of every kind, for organizations including the National Geographic Society, the United States Coast Guard, the International Monetary Fund, and many Fortune 100 companies. Whether your travels take you to popular destinations or off the beaten path on expeditions, things can go wrong - very wrong - and you will be glad to have Lizard Bites & Street Riots by your side.

A History of International Oil Politics is both an argument for multi-theoretical pluralism and a proposal for a theory-synergetic approach in international relations. Murad Gassanly, a distinguished international relations scholar and rising British politician, explores how international relations paradigms could be utilized in approaching the vital field of international oil politics, specifically historical issues of international energy politics and comparative case studies of energy transmission networks - the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor. This highly original study explores the historical timeline of global energy to demonstrate how a theory-synergetic analysis might offer a deeper and more holistic understanding. As an academic discipline, international relations now offers a maelstrom of competing epistemological, ontological, and normative contestations. Gassanly, however, argues that theoretical diversity has knowledge-producing and maximizing potential and that pluralism does not impede academic progress. Applying different theoretical models to oil politics reveals different realities, but the synergetic whole is greater than the sum of its constituent paradigmatic parts. Empirical convergences between theoretical accounts provides a broad analytical framework for active theoretical synergy.

Born in 1853, Jared Flagg was the black sheep of an illustrious New York family. His father, Jared Bradley Flagg, was a noted portraitist and Episcopalian minister who served as Rector of Grace Church, in Brooklyn Heights. His older brothers were prominent, Paris-trained artists. A younger brother became a famous architect, while another went on to found a major Wall Street brokerage. One of his younger sisters married publisher Charles Scribner, II; another was one of the famed "400" Manhattan socialites.Jared, Jr., on the other hand, took to the seamier side of American life, instigating any number of illegal schemes, ranging from leasing furnished flats to facilitating prostitution, to finding chorus line and modeling jobs for pretty but talentless young women, to a phony investment scheme that paid 52% a year, to the sale of worthless bonds backed by heavily mortgaged real estate. Frequently penalized for his criminal and unethical activities by the time of his death in 1926, Jared Flagg had barreled his way through Gilded and Jazz Age America, offering a fascinating and heretofore unknown view of how a rising empire evolved through crucial eras in its history.

As the beating drums within the United States for a war with Iran grow louder, it is important, now more than ever, to understand precisely how and why neo-conservatives have chosen to orchestrate a sustained and coordinated campaign for a U.S. attack on Iran, or short of that, support an Israeli strike against the Islamic Republic's nuclear technology facilities. This campaign is aimed at convincing U.S. politicians, and policy- and decision-makers, that the Iranian regime is inherently evil and dangerous, and is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of attacking Israel.This study breaks down some of the key rhetorical techniques neo-conservatives have utilized in this campaign, which gained serious momentum following the official withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq from 2007-2011 and the ratifying of the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2015. It also locates and dissects the origins and the nature of the political and religious sources inspiring these choices, exploring the motivating roles played by ideas such as U.S., Israeli, and Jewish exceptionalism, and the concept of the End Times.While this work is heavily geared towards focusing on how and why the neo-conservatives have chosen to engage themselves in the war of ideas about the 'true nature' of the Iranian regime, its people and their intentions, it also addresses the 'bricks and mortar;' aspect of the neo-conservative network primarily operating in and around Washington D.C. and New York.

Spain's American empire began as the serendipitous outgrowth of the search for a shortcut to China. That search derived from two mid-fifteenth-century developments: the Ming Dynasty's decision to adopt a silver standard for its medium of exchange and the Ottoman Turks' capture of Constantinople in 1453. China's great demand for silver and the disruption of the Silk Road drove the need to find alternative access to China. King John II of Portugal sent explorers southward along the coast of Africa and thence to the Orient, but Ferdinand and Isabella sent Christopher Columbus westward, believing he would find a shorter route.A persistent if disorderly push by Spanish conquistadors led to the discovery of previously unknown civilizations, including the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas. The search for a short-cut to China became bound up with the seizure of the riches held by native populations. Although the conquistadors were vastly outnumbered, their superior technology-steel swords, armor, war horses, and firearms-concomitant with diseases that accompanied them, enabled them to subdue native American peoples and confiscate their wealth.The aftermath was fraught with complications and strife. Crown- appointed governors came into conflict with the conquistadors. Distances were great, and the governors tended to place their interests over those of the King. Cortez conquered the Aztecs despite the governor's attempts to prevent his campaign. Bureaucratic interference bedeviled Francisco Pizzaro's campaign against the Incas, which, nonetheless, contributed more to the wealth of his country than any other conquistador's exploits. Ultimately, the vast wealth of the Americas would fuel Spain and its Empire for nearly two centuries.

Top analyst Leslie Gruis's timely new book argues that privacy is an individual right and democratic value worth preserving, even in a cyberized world. Since the time of the printing press, technology has played a key role in the evolution of individual rights and helped privacy emerge as a formal legal concept.All governments exercise extraordinary powers during national security crises. In the United States, many imminent threats during the twentieth century induced heightened government intrusion into the privacy of Americans. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, 1978) reversed that trend. Other laws protect the private information of individuals held in specific sectors of the commercial world. Risk management practices were extended to computer networks, and standards for information system security began to emerge. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) incorporated many such standards into its Cybersecurity Framework, and is currently developing a Privacy Framework. These standards all contribute to a patchwork of privacy protection which, so far, falls far short of what the U.S. constitutional promise offers and what our public badly needs. Greater privacy protections for U.S. citizens will come as long as Americans remember how democracy and privacy sustain one another, and demonstrate their commitment to them.