Bodies Of Tomorrow

Bodies of Tomorrow argues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world.

Architecture and design have been used to exert control over bodies, across lines of class, gender and race. They regulate access to certain spaces and facilities, impose physical or psychological barriers, and make particular activities possible for specific groups. Built in 1951, the War Memorial Gymnasium at the University of British Columbia is a prize-winning example of modernist architecture. Although conceived to honour the dead of World War II, it was far from being a neutral memorial and gymnasium for everyday athletes. This collection shows what the design, construction and shifting functions and spatial configurations of the building reveal about the values and aspirations of the university in the post-war years. It shows how the building reflected the social and power relations among university administrators, architects and planners, faculty, staff and students, and demonstrates how the culture and structure of the gymnasium responded to changing attitudes to competition, discipline, profession, gender, race and health. As the editors explain, built form has politics, and culture - sporting culture - is just politics by another name.

In the oral and written histories of every culture, there are countless records of men and women who have displayed extraordinary physical, mental, and spiritual capacities. In modern times, those records have been supplemented by scientific studies of exceptional functioning. Are the limits of human growth fixed? Are extraordinary abilities latent within everyone? Is there evidence that humanity has unrealized capacities for self-transcendence? Are there specific practices through which ordinary people can develop these abilities? Michael Murphy has studied these questions for over thirty years. In The Future of the Body, he presents evidence for metanormal perception, cognition, movement, vitality, and spiritual development from more than 3,000 sources. Surveying ancient and modern records in medical science, sports, anthropology, the arts, psychical research, comparative religious studies, and dozens of other disciplines, Murphy has created an encyclopedia of exceptional functioning of body, mind, and spirit. He paints a broad and convincing picture of the possibilities of further evolutionary development of human attributes. By studying metanormal abilities under a wide range of conditions, Murphy suggests that we can identify those activities that typically evoke these capacities and assemble them into a coherent program of transformative practice. A few of Murphy's central observations and proposal include: The observation that cultural conditioning powerfully shapes (or extinguishes) metanormal capacities. The proposition that we cannot comprehend our potentials for extraordinary life without an empirical approach that involves many fields of inquiry and different kinds of knowing. The notion that a widespread realization of extraordinary capacities would constitute an evolutionary transcendence analogous to the rise of humankind from its primal ancestry. The proposal that all or most instances of significant human development are produced by a limited number of identifiable activities such as disciplined self-observation, visualization of desired capacities, and caring for others. The idea that a balanced development of our various capacities is possible through integrated practices. In The Future Of The Body, Murphy states that such practices can carry forward Earth's evolutionary adventure and lead humanity to the next step in its development.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

In her first full-length book, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of the acclaimed Mood Indigo essay I Choose Elena, writes about the secrets a woman's body keeps, from puberty to menstruation to sexual pleasure; to pregnancy or its absence; and to darker secrets of abuse, invasion or violation. Through the voices of women around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, My Body Keeps Your Secrets tells the story of the young woman's body in 2021. Moving from girlhood and adolescence to young womanhood, Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key feminist thinker of a new generation with this widely researched and boldly argued work about reclaiming our bodies in the age of social media.

When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER A JIMMY FALLON BOOK CLUB PICK In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. "Utterly brilliant. In this sweeping, gorgeously written novel, Gabrielle Zevin charts the beauty, tenacity, and fragility of human love and creativity. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is one of the best books I've ever read." —John Green On a bitter cold day, in the December of his Junior Year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. They borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo: a game where players can escape the confines of a body and the betrayals of a heart, and where death means nothing more than a chance to restart and play again. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy. Spanning over thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, games as artform, technology and the human experience, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.