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  Peter Tchaikovsky: A short...

  5 Minutes, 5 Minute Biographies,...

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  Peter Tchaikovsky, Russian composer and tragic figure: Life and work in a short biography! Everything you need to know, brief and concise. Infotainment, education and entertainment at its best!

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  Convivial Futures - Views from a...

  Frank Adloff, Alain Caillé

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  What steps are needed to make life better and more convivial? The Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020) has presented a short diagnosis of the current crises and sketches of a possible and desirable future. It has been a necessary work of theoretical synthesis, but preserving a viable world also requires passion. It is thus urgent to show what people would gain from a shift to a post-neoliberal and post-growth convivialist future. This volume includes a theoretical debate on convivialism which reflects dystopias and shows the multiple and major obstacles that convivialism will have to face. Mainly, however, the contributors to this volume create sketches of a convivial future and collect accounts of another future world which is attractive for as many as possible.

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  The Plague Years - A Doctor’s...

  Ross A. Slotten MD

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  In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten signed more death certificates in Chicago—and, by inference, the state of Illinois—than anyone else. As a family physician, he was trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were friends, colleagues, and lovers, shunned by most of the medical community because they were gay and HIV positive. Slotten wasn’t an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as both a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in one of the worst epidemics in modern history. 
   
  Plague Years is an unprecedented first-person account of that epidemic, spanning not just the city of Chicago but four continents as well. Slotten provides an intimate yet comprehensive view of the disease’s spread alongside heartfelt portraits of his patients and his own conflicted feelings as a medical professional, drawn from more than thirty years of personal notebooks. In telling the story of someone who was as much a potential patient as a doctor, Plague Years sheds light on the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in ways that no previous medical memoir has.

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  The French Revolution's Famine -...

  Sarah Willards

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  The late 18th century in France was marked by a series of economic struggles that would lay the foundation for the famine that contributed significantly to the outbreak of the French Revolution. One of the most crucial factors was the growing economic strain on both the peasantry and the urban poor. France's agrarian economy, which was heavily reliant on consistent harvests, faced major setbacks in the years leading up to the Revolution. Bad harvests in 1787 and 1788, exacerbated by poor weather conditions, decimated crops across the nation, causing widespread food shortages. 
  The economic problems were further compounded by rising bread prices. Bread, being a staple food for the French population, became more expensive as the grain harvests failed. With less grain available for baking, the cost of bread surged, and the poor, particularly in urban areas, found it increasingly difficult to afford enough food to survive. For many, bread was their primary source of sustenance, and its scarcity sparked anger and frustration across the nation. 
  This economic hardship revealed the inefficiency of the French monarchy in dealing with the crisis. King Louis XVI’s government, already deeply in debt from wars and lavish spending, was unable to provide effective solutions. The inability of the monarchy to alleviate the suffering of the common people, particularly in the face of rising food prices, further eroded public trust in the regime. The discontent simmered beneath the surface, particularly in cities like Paris, where the urban poor were most vulnerable to food shortages.

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  Authors of the Impossible - The...

  Jeffrey J. Kripal

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  “Outstanding and almost certainly controversial. . . . [Kripal] has promise to revitalize and extend the reach of religious studies.”  —Choice Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion. Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and sociologist Bertrand Méheust. Through incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between consciousness and culture all come together in Authors of the Impossible, a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred and the scientific.   “An excellent book. . . . engaging, witty, and thoughtful.” -- Christopher Partridge, Lancaster University “[Kripal] demands nothing short of a paradigm shift in order to make sense of the odd, the anomalous, and the inexplicable.” —Catherine L. Albanese, University of California, Santa Barbara “Quietly earth-shattering.” — Victoria Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets

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  Vertical Progress - The New...

  K. Oxovuieu

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  Today people more than ever are overwhelmed by worry about current events. Why are some people devoured by hatred and bigotry? Can we avoid the next economic crisis? Can we prevent the next global war? Will computers take over our civilization any time soon? Even though Vertical Progress does not have all answers, it provides readers with plenty of new ideas to open the debate. Vertical Progress offers a hypothesis and rationale that provides not only a different look at past events but also explains much of what is happening now. The book sees the human society as a well-designed, complex information system that has a single purpose—to build a collective knowledge. Using results of the computer simulations author demonstrating that as just a heard of collaborative individuals, the society would not be able to make any substantial progress. The book logically connects the latest achievements of science with the findings of the computer simulation experiment to lead readers to the inevitable conclusion—the social information system would not make any progress unless it operates with more than one type of nodes. Hence, the author suggests that our civilization consists of more than one human kind.

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