An absorbing, original, and ambitious work of reportage from the acclaimed New Yorker correspondent

During the past decade, Peter Hessler has persistently illuminated worlds both foreign and familiar--ranging from China, where he served as The New Yorker's correspondent from 2000 to 2007, to southwestern Colorado, where he lived for four years. Strange Stones is an engaging, thought-provoking collection of Hessler's best pieces, showcasing his range as a storyteller and his gift for writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider. From a taste test between two rat restaurants in South China to a profile of Yao Ming to the moving story of a small-town pharmacist, these pieces are bound by subtle but meaningful ideas: the strength of local traditions, the surprising overlap between cultures, and the powerful lessons drawn from individuals who straddle different worlds.

Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of Peter Hessler's work.

How the immigration policies and popular culture of the 1980's fused to shape modern views on democracy In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the circle of who was considered American seemed to broaden, reflecting the democratic gains made by racial minorities and women. Although this expanded circle was increasingly visible in the daily lives of Americans through TV shows, films, and popular news media, these gains were circumscribed by the discourse that certain immigrants, for instance single and working mothers, were feared, censured, or welcomed exclusively as laborers. In The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration, Leah Perry argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. Blending critical legal analysis with a feminist media studies methodology over a range of sources, including legal documents, congressional debates, and popular media, such as Golden Girls, Who's the Boss?, Scarface, and Mi Vida Loca, Perry shows how even while "multicultural" immigrants were embraced, they were at the same time disciplined through gendered discourses of respectability. Examining the relationship between law and culture, this book weaves questions of legal status and gender into existing discussions about race and ethnicity to revise our understanding of both neoliberalism and immigration.

What was it that got you through the Covid-19 pandemic? For some it was long walks; others turned to home baking. For millions it was video games, a booming industry which exploded in popularity over the pandemic years. Confined to our homes and with the lines of reality becoming blurred as everyday life shifted to screens, perhaps it was no wonder that so many of us were desperate to be transported to different worlds. In Playing with Reality: Gaming in a Pandemic, journalist and presenter Alex Humphreys, a passionate gamer herself, investigates this extraordinary boom in the gaming industry. Charting its rise, Alex interviews players and developers, sharing a glimpse of what was going on behind closed doors as studios closed and games were finished from home. Playing with Reality explores exactly what it was that made gaming a lifeline for so many, and what the future holds as we look to the metaverse.

"Bruce Grit will prove extremely valuable to scholars who do not have access to the Schomburg's Bruce collection or the time necessary for the daunting task of sifting through its contents." --African American Review
John Edward Bruce (1856-1924) witnessed the dying days of American slavery, the turbulence of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the development of American imperialism. As a journalist, historian, and bibliophile, he was a major figure in African American history and politics during his lifetime. In this first intellectual biography of Bruce--a prolific writer and correspondent who published most frequently under the name Bruce Grit--William Seraile explores Bruce's tireless advocacy on behalf of African peoples everywhere, particularly in the United States.
William Seraile traces Bruce's shifting strategies and tactics and his alliances with famous contemporaries such as Arthur A. Schomburg, Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey. He argues that underlying all of Bruce's work was what would become his greatest legacy: his promotion of history and culture of African people in the diaspora as valuable fields of study.
William Seraile is professor emeritus of Lehman College. He is the author of Voice of Dissent: Theophilus Gould Steward and Black America, Fire in His Heart: Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner and the A.M.E. Church, and New York's Black Regiments During the Civil War.

Joe Maltz's career as a broadcast engineer with the American Broadcasting Company spanned thirty-seven years and was followed by five years as a consultant to the television industry. In his memoir, "My Adventures in Broadcasting," he takes a look back at his experiences during television's "golden years" from the usually invisible point of view of an engineer.

Maltz participated in the technical preparation and execution of five Olympic Games, including the 1972 Munich Olympics, during which he covered the tragedy that unfolded there. For his engineering work on Olympic technical design, he won two Emmys. He also covered four political conventions and the first televised coverage of a Russian-American track meet in Moscow, which took place during the Cold War.

Over the years memoirs about television broadcasting have been written and published by many notables in the industry. These memoirs recall events from an "on-air" perspective, ignoring the participation of the technical people that enabled these events to be successfully produced and executed. My Adventures in Broadcasting offers a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on television coverage of major news and sporting events fills that void.

Precariousness has become a defining experience in contemporary society, as an inescapable condition and state of being. Living with Precariousness presents a spectrum of timely case studies that explore precarious existences – at individual, collective and structural levels, and as manifested through space and the body. These range from the plight of asylum seekers, to the tiny house movement as a response to affordable housing crises; from the global impacts of climate change, to the daily challenges of living with a chronic illness. This multidisciplinary book illustrates the pervasiveness of precarity, but furthermore shows how those entanglements with other agents, human or otherwise, that put us at risk are also the connections that make living with (and through) precariousness endurable.

Rooted in the author's experience as an entrepreneur and creative professional, Thrive! The Creative's Guidebook to Professional Tenacity helps those in creative fields acquire the skills and tools needed to successfully market their talents and manage their careers. Speaking directly to how creatives think about and conduct business, the text is filled with engaging and accessible exercises, strategies, and tips. The six units cover branding, searching for clients, asserting the value of creative work, pitching your talents, leveraging social and other media, managing finances and taxes, and more. Each chapter includes business terms creatives need to know, action tasks to prepare for the professional work ahead, and specific guidance about how the content can be applied in the real world. Fresh and innovative, Thrive! The Creative's Guidebook to Professional Tenacity understands the importance of speaking to creative professionals in their own language, and showing them how to leverage their outside-the-box skills to achieve professional and financial success. The book is ideal for anyone studying or working in the fields of art and design, or any creative endeavor.

Autumn on the Trail to Santiago begins where Sons of Thunder left off... same man, same spirit... blood, sweat and soul expressed out the same marrow but much is changed with the landscape, skyscape and timescape that inform the in-scape of mind. The eye popping Whippit hit of June and July's Spain mellows now in the soft autumnal exhale reflected in cooling days, lengthening nights and the repletion and harvest of agricultural labors along a string of trails spanning across southern France, over the Pyrenees, along northern Spain and into Santiago for a second time this year. While writing Autumn on the Trail to Santiago natural section breaks appeared in a way they did not in the flood-rush of Sons of Thunder. The initial 'On n'est pas riche mais on vie bien' segment is a toast to my family and to the love expressed in a plate of food. 'Between the Rabbits' puts comestible brackets around le Chemin d'Arles, from Arles to the Pyrenees. 'Aragonia' describes el Camino Aragones' descent from the storm ravaged Pyrenees-Pirineos into Spain, to re-connect with el Camino Frances in Puenta la Reina. And 'Broken Water, Spanish Rain' is the long last leg of the journey; a dark wet trek down the metaphysical birth canal to Santiago, to the sea, and to the rest of life beyond this adventure.

It is the summer of 1939 in England when soldiers start digging trenches in a local park. Suddenly, seven-year-old John Adams is forced to face a new reality. He and his school are abruptly evacuated to an unknown destination. Two days later, war is declared. As the sky lights up with searchlights and German bombing raids increase, Adams' natural instincts to dig for the real story kick in-beginning what would eventually become a remark-able journey as a journalist.

By fourteen, Adams had published his rst article in a major national paper, Britain's "Daily Mirror." At nineteen, he was ghting in the Korean War. He became a military reporter for London's "Daily Telegraph" and battled against communist propaganda during the Cold War as a correspondent and news director of Radio Free Europe. He o ers an unforgettable glimpse into the fascinating world of news, including insights into what it was like to interact with such disparate public gures as the Duke of Wellington, Otto von Habsburg, Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

"In the Trenches" explores one man's experiences, perspectives, and memories as he witnesses extraordinary times in history through the ever-curious eyes of a reporter.

"Adams saw it all with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears. He lived it."
-Andrew Alexander, former Ombudsman, the "Washington Post," and Washington bureau chief, Cox Newspapers

As business paradigms shift from desktop-centric environments to data-centric mobile environments, mobile services create numerous new business opportunities. At the same time, these advances may also challenge many of the basic premises of existing business models. Mobile Services Industries, Technologies, and Applications in the Global Economy fosters a scientific understanding of mobile services, provides a timely publication of current research efforts, and forecasts future trends in the mobile services industry and its important role in the world economy. Written for academics, researchers, government policymakers, and corporate managers, this comprehensive volume will outline the great potential for new business models and applications in mobile commerce.

In this concise and detailed work, Salim Lamrani addresses questions of media concentration and corporate bias by examining a perennially controversial topic: Cuba. Lamrani argues that the tiny island nation is forced to contend not only with economic isolation and a U.S. blockade, but with misleading or downright hostile media coverage. He takes as his case study El Pais, the most widely distributed Spanish daily. El Pais (a property of Grupo Prisa, the largest Spanish media conglomerate), has editions aimed at Europe, Latin America, and the U.S., making it is a global opinion leader. Lamrani wades through a swamp of reporting and uses the paper as an example of how media conglomerates distort and misrepresent life in Cuba and the activities of its government. By focusing on eight key areas, including human development, internal opposition, and migration, Lamrani shows how the media systematically shapes our understanding of Cuban reality. This book, with a preface by Eduardo Galeano, provides an alternative view, combining a scholar's eye for complexity with a journalist's hunger for the facts.

In recent years, Intellectual Property Rights - both in the form of patents and copyrights - have expanded in their coverage, the breadth and depth of protection, and the tightness of their enforcement. Moreover, for the first time in history, the IPR regime has become increasingly uniform at international level by means of the TRIPS agreement, irrespectively of the degrees of development of the various countries. This volume, first, addresses from different angles the effects of IPR on the processes of innovation and innovation diffusion in general, and with respect to developing countries in particular. Contrary to a widespread view, there is very little evidence that the rates of innovation increase with the tightness of IPR even in developed countries. Conversely, in many circumstances, tight IPR represents an obstacle to imitation and innovation diffusion in developing countries. What can policies do then? This is the second major theme of the book which offers several detailed discussions of possible policy measures even within the current TRIPS regime - including the exploitation of the waivers to IPR enforcement that it contains, various forms of development of 'technological commons', and non-patent rewards to innovators, such as prizes. Some drawbacks of the regimes, however, are unavoidable: hence the advocacy in many contributions to the book of deep reforms of the system in both developed and developing countries, including the non-patentability of scientific discoveries, the reduction of the depth and breadth of IPR patents, and the variability of the degrees of IPR protection according to the levels of a country's development.

An examination of the connections between modernist writers and editorial activities, Making Canada New draws links among new and old media, collaborative labour, emergent scholars and scholarships, and digital modernisms. In doing so, the collection reveals that renovating modernisms does not need to depend on the fabrication of completely new modes of scholarship. Rather, it is the repurposing of already existing practices and combining them with others - whether old or new, print or digital - that instigates a process of continuous renewal. Critical to this process of renewal is the intermingling of print and digital research methods and the coordination of more popular modes of literary scholarship with less frequented ones, such as bibliography, textual studies, and editing. Making Canada New tracks the editorial renovation of modernism as a digital phenomenon while speaking to the continued production of print editions.

Media power is a crucial, although often taken for granted, concept. We assume, for example, that the media are 'powerful'; if they were not, why would there be so many controversies over the regulation, control and impact of communicative institutions and processes? Further, we assume that this 'power' is somehow problematic; audiences are often treated as highly susceptible to media influence and too much 'power' in the hands of one organization or individual is seen as risky and potentially dangerous. These concerns have been at the heart of recent controversies involving the relationships between media moguls and political elites, the consequences of phone hacking in the UK, and the emerging influence of social media as vital gatekeepers. Yet it is still not clear what we mean by media power or how effective it is. This book evaluates contrasting definitions of media power and looks at the key sites in which power is negotiated, concentrated and resisted - politically, technologically and economically. Combining an evaluation of both previous literature and new research, the book seeks to establish an understanding of media power which does justice to the complexities and contradictions of the contemporary social world. It will be important reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and activists alike.