After Ben

A Seattle Stories novel A year after the sudden death of his longtime partner, Ben, Theo Anderson is still grieving. The last thing he's looking for is a new lover. But as Theo soon discovers, sometimes life has other plans. While Theo experiences a powerful physical attraction to fellow gym member Peter, it's his new online friend, Morgan, who provides the intellectual challenge to make him come alive. Morgan is witty, brave, and irreverent, and Theo is ready to take the plunge⦠until he discovers Morgan might be half his age. Theo's late partner was significantly olderâenough to strain Theo's relationship with his familyâand the potential of another relationship being cut short leaves him gunshy. Theo needs to lay Ben's memory to rest, reconcile with his family, and rekindle neglected friendships if he's to start afresh with a new lover. But Theo isn't the only one with a past. His biggest challenge, in living after Ben, might not be his to face.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'A dystopian odyssey through the dark authoritarian landscape of the modern world' The Times To be born American in the late twentieth century was to take the fact of a particular kind of American exceptionalism as granted – a state of nature arrived at after all else had failed. In the span of just thirty years, this assumption would come crashing down. After the fall, we must determine what it means to be American again. In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outwards. Over the next three years, he travelled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. Along the way, a Russian opposition leader he spends time with is poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he comes to know see their movement snuffed out, and America itself reaches the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance. After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. Throughout, Rhodes comes to realize how much America's fingerprints are on a world it helped to shape: through the excesses of the post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism, post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, mania for technology and social media, and the racism that shaped the backlash to the Obama presidency. At the same time, he learns from a diverse set of characters – from Obama to rebels to a rising generation of leaders – how looking squarely at where America has gone wrong only makes it more essential to fight for what America is supposed to be – for itself, and for the entire world.

Joseph Ben-David died twenty-five years ago, in January 1986. An eminent sociologist of science, and a co-founder of this sub-discipline, he was only sixty-five years old. Few social scientists are remembered after they die and can no longer parlay their influence into the goods of this world for colleagues and acquaintances. This was not Ben-David's fate. His work continues to be taught and referred to by scholars spread far and wide (in terms of both countries and disciplines). His students never forgot him, his books were republished, and his essays appeared in new collections. Ben-David's legacy includes ideas and ideals. Its central tenet is the autonomy of science, its right--and duty--to be value-free. Scholarship oriented to any goal other than the accumulation of objective knowledge about empirical reality, for him, was science no longer and did not have its authority. In this light, the life of scholarship was one of moral dedication, with nothing less than the fate of liberal democratic society depending on it. And for science to thrive, the university, its home, had to be the embodiment of the cardinal virtue of this society: the virtue of civility. In the spirit of Ben-David, believing that scholarly debate advances common good, and rational discourse wins whichever way arguments in it are settled, this festschrift debates such core issues as the nature of science, its changing definition and position in Western society, the forms of organization optimal for scientific creativity, and the ability of the research university to foster scientific growth, while also performing its educational role.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

David Ben-Gurion cast an enormous shadow across his world, and his legacy in the Middle East and beyond continues to be hotly debated to this day. There have been many books written about the life and accomplishments of the Zionist icon and founder of modern Israel, but this new biography by eminent Israeli historian Anita Shapira is the first to get to the core of the complex man who would become the face of a new nation. Shapira tells the Ben-Gurion story anew, focusing especially on the period in 1948 immediately following Israel's declaration of independence, a time few historians have concentrated on and none have explored in such intimate detail. Through her intensive research and access to Ben-Gurion's personal archives and rarely viewed documents and letters, the author gained powerful insights into his private persona. Her fascinating literary portrait of David Ben-Gurion bares the flesh-and-blood man inside the influential historical figure who brought the Zionist dream to full fruition.

'The best I've read of Elton's many bestsellers' The Times Imagine a world where no one you have ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps they never will be. 1st June 1914: this is Hugh Stanton's reality. Ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer, he is is quite literally the loneliest man on earth. Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come. He knows this because, for him, that century is already history. Somehow he must change that history. He must prevent the war. A war that will begin with a single bullet. But can a single bullet truly corrupt an entire century? And, if so, could another single bullet save it?

An “emotion-filled story of family dynamics and self-discovery . . . brimming with interesting characters” from the bestselling author of The Liverpool Trilogy (Booklist). The members of the eccentric Compton-Milnes household act more like strangers than family. Despite having multiple sclerosis, the elder matriarch, Hermione, controls the household and insists on a Tuesday morning family breakfast. Her son, Gus, a reclusive but brilliant professor, and daughter-in-law Lisa, a foolishly promiscuous cosmetic surgery addict, remain married, but without much of a relationship. Their two grown children, Ben and Harriet, are also under the same roof, yet miles apart from the rest of the family. Ben’s OCD keeps him from facing the world, while his sister Harriet sacrifices her own desires in order to take care of him. Lisa’s series of poorly chosen affairs finally catches up to her when she accidentally becomes friends with her latest lover’s wife. When he turns on her, the family is forced to pull together for the very first time if they are to survive with any degree of sanity.

A polemical analysis of the politics and economics of today's vernacular photographic cultures. In Photography After Capitalism, Benedict Burbridge makes the case for a radically expanded conception of photography, encompassing the types of labor too often obscured by black-boxed technologies, slick platform interfaces, and the compulsion to display lives to others. His lively and polemical analysis of today's vernacular photographic cultures shines new light on the hidden work of smartphone assembly teams, digital content moderators, Street View car drivers, Google “Scan-Ops,”low-paid gallery interns, homeless participant photographers, and the photo-sharing masses. Bringing together cultural criticism, social history, and political philosophy, Burbridge examines how representations of our photographic lives—in advertising, journalism, scholarship and, particularly, contemporary art—shape a sense of what photography is and the social relations that comprise it. More precisely, he focuses on how different critical and creative strategies—from the appropriation of social media imagery to performative traversals of the network, from documentaries about secretive manual labor to science fiction fantasies of future sabotage—affect our understanding of photography's interactions with political and economic systems. Drawing insight and inspiration from recent analyses of digital labour, community economies and post-capitalism, Burbridge harnesses the ubiquity of photography to cognitively map contemporary capitalism in search of its weak spots and levers, sites of resistance, and opportunities to build better worlds.