Beyond Portia

A resource to help judges, lawyers, scholars, and students gain insight into the real lives of women whom the law purports to represent but whose self-representations have historically been excluded from legal discourse.

When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world.

Step into the fascinating realm of 'Echoes Beyond Curtain,' where the emerging writers skillfully combine innovation and tradition to create contemporary one-act masterpieces that recreate the Bard's works with unrelenting originality and precise attention to detail. More than merely a compilation of tales, 'Echoes Beyond Curtain' is an inscription to the timeless appeal of writing and the boundless potential of young minds. Join in on this literary journey and explore the captivating retellings that uphold Shakespeare's legacy.

For students and writers alike, a brilliant guide to the craft of writing by the National Book Award–winning author of Spartina. National Book Award winner John Casey is a masterful novelist who is also an inspiring and beloved teacher. In Beyond the First Draft he offers essential and original insights into the art of writing—and rewriting—fiction. Through anecdotes about other writers’ methods and habits (as well as his own) and close readings of literature from Aristotle to Zola, the essays in this collection offer “suggestions about things to do, things to think about when your writing has got you lost in the woods.” In “Dogma and Anti-dogma” Casey sets out the tried-and-true advice and then comments on when to apply it and when to ignore it. In “What's Funny” he considers the range of comedy from pratfalls to elegant wit. In “In Other Words” he discusses translations and the surprising effects that translating can have on one’s native language. In “Mentors” he pays tribute to those who have guided him and other writers. Throughout the fourteen essays there are notes on voice, point of view, structure, and other crucial elements. This book is an invaluable resource for aspiring writers and a revitalizing companion for seasoned ones.

Despite the success of her sultry Red Choo sex blog,it would take serious buzz to put Mercedes Brooks'sfirst book of erotic fantasies on the bestseller list. Andthat meant agreeing to another showdown with her nemesis, the super-sexy TV pundit Sam Porter. This time, though, the on-air innuendos were just a dressrehearsal. What happened later between the sheets wasactually the main event. If the tabloids got wind of theirnight together, Sam's career would self-destruct. But thereal shocker was that even with a prime-time scandalhanging over their heads, one night was not enough!

Forty-year-old Portia Fraser practices law in Cascade City, a small Washington State community. For the past fifteen years, she's built up a substantial client base and has managed to balance her job with her family. But the upcoming months will test her limits, both professionally and personally . Portia finds herself involved in a multitude of lawsuits, each one bringing its own challenge. When a sleazy lawyer named Seth Thompson hatches an evil scheme to cheat four orphans out of their inheritance, Portia calls on all her years of training to thwart him. But after successfully winning the case, she faces a personal dilemma brought on by her troubled marriage and her unfaithful husband. Facing mental and physical exhaustion, Portia travels to Paris to recuperate. There she meets and falls captive to the charms of a virile Frenchman, Henri, who makes her feel young again. Her month-long sabbatical quickly ends when her husband is involved in an accident. Portia returns to America, divorces her husband, and dives back into her workload. But she cannot forget those few days in Paris that radically changed her perception of the world, and she wonders if life will ever be the same again .

Showcasing a wide array of recent, innovative and original research into Shakespeare and learning in Australasia and beyond, this volume argues the value of the 'local' and provides transferable and adaptable models of educational theory and practice.

?Soul of the age!? Ben Jonson eulogized Shakespeare, and in the next breath, ?He was not of an age but for all time.? That he was both ?of the age? and ?for all time? is, this book suggests, the key to Shakespeare?s comic genius. In this engaging introduction to the First Folio comedies, Paul A. Olson gives a persuasive and thoroughly engrossing account of the playwright?s comic transcendence, showing how Shakespeare, by taking on the great themes of his time, elevated comedy from a mere mid-level literary form to its own form of greatness?on par with epic and tragedy. Like the best tragic or epic writers, Shakespeare in his comedies goes beyond private and domestic matters in order to draw on the whole of the commonwealth. He examines how a ruler?s or a court?s community at the household and local levels shapes the politics of empire?existing or nascent empires such as England, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire or part empires such as Rome and Athens?where all their suffering and silliness play into how they govern. In Olson?s work we also see how Shakespeare?s appropriation of his age?s ideas about classical myth and biblical scriptures bring to his comic action a sort of sacral profundity in keeping with notions of poetry as ?inspired? and comic endings as more than merely happy but as, in fact, uncommonly joyful.