Capture

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

In the first book in the Guardians... series, the reader is introduced to Soren, a barn owl and the centerpiece of the series.

Motion capture is a technique for recording a performance and then translating it into mathematical terms. Animating motion is critical for the development of applications such as animation, virtual environments and video games. Character animation is the process by which natural movements are modelled and digitized so that digital character movements appear as natural as possible. There are three approaches to character animation: keyframe animation, motion capture, and simulation.

Dr. David A. Kessler, the dynamic and controversial former FDA commissioner known for battling the tobacco industry, has spent the past two decades studying how certain addictive substances influence our behaviour. In his first two books, Dr. Kessler explored the ways in which tobacco and food can exert control over our thoughts and actions; in Capture, he broadens this conversation exponentially, exploring the very underpinnings of why we suffer from any mental affliction—such as addiction, depression, anxiety, neurosis and panic—under which our logical minds and better intentions feel as though they have been hijacked by something we cannot control. Capture draws upon the latest thinking in psychology, medicine and neuroscience to examine the common mechanism by which this range of mental disorders takes hold in the mind; it also offers a sweeping narrative history of the role of “capture”—the term Dr. Kessler coins for the phenomenon by which the mind is taken hostage—throughout literature, philosophy, religion and art. From Aristotle’s belief in the triumph of human virtue to William James’ concept of selective attention to Freud’s model of repressed desire, Kessler traces the history of Western thought on capture. In doing so, he illuminates history’s most valuable contributions as well as its shortcomings in understanding and treating mental distress. Kessler argues that to truly understand the nature of capture, we must view it not only through the lens of intellect, but also our own human experiences—and so the book begins with stories, and continues to offer narratives of people who are, or were at some point, in capture’s throes; stories that offer an incredibly evocative, almost palpable viewpoint of anguish. This includes candid conversations and raw accounts of substance abuse, anorexia, obsessive love, gambling and sexual compulsions in everyday people; the words of writers such as David Foster Wallace, Franz Kafka and Anne Sexton, who elucidated their own despair with urgency and eloquence; and portraits of those cases of capture that have become infamous for their violent outcomes—including Sirhan Sirhan and Ted Kaczynski. Through this storytelling Kessler offers an extraordinary portal into the realm of capture, a chance to better understand its manifestations, and a way of considering how it can seize our attention and overtake our behavior in ways that can be benign, tragic or—for some—transcendent. The closer we can come to fully comprehending this mechanism, Dr. Kessler argues, the better chance we stand at being able to both alleviate its deleterious effects and, ultimately, overcome its grip by changing our thoughts and behaviour. More than twenty years in the making, this impeccably researched book is nothing less than a successful effort to inform everything from the smallest action to the largest life aim, a unified field theory of human activity that draws in how we form thoughts, manage trauma and even try to reconcile will and cause. “A fascinating account of the science of human appetite, as well as its exploitation by the food industry.” —MICHAEL POLLAN, AUTHOR OF IN DEFENCE OF FOOD, ON THE END OF OVEREATING

Who controls the media today? There are many media systems across the globe that claim to be free yet whose independence has been eroded. As demagogues rise, independent voices have been squeezed out. Corporate-owned media companies that act in the service of power increasingly exercise soft censorship. Tech giants such as Facebook and Google have dramatically changed how people access information, with consequences that are only beginning to be felt. This book features pathbreaking analysis from journalists and academics of the changing nature and peril of media capture—how formerly independent institutions fall under the sway of governments, plutocrats, and corporations. Contributors including Emily Bell, Felix Salmon, Joshua Marshall, Joel Simon, and Nikki Usher analyze diverse cases of media capture worldwide—from the United Kingdom to Turkey to India and beyond—many drawn from firsthand experience. They examine the role played by new media companies and funders, showing how the confluence of the growth of big tech and falling revenues for legacy media has led to new forms of control. Contributions also shed light on how the rise of right-wing populists has catalyzed the crisis of global media. They also chart a way forward, exploring the growing need for a policy response and sustainable models for public-interest investigative journalism. Providing valuable insight into today’s urgent threats to media independence, Media Capture is essential reading for anyone concerned with defending press freedom in the digital age.

Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information about Chinese migrants. Among the bewildering array of state documents used in this effort were CI 9s: issued from 1885 to 1953, they included date of birth, place of residence, occupation, identifying marks, known associates, and, significantly, identification photographs. The originals were transferred to microfilm and destroyed in 1963; more than 41,000 grainy reproductions of CI 9s remain. Lily Cho explores how the CI 9s functioned as a form of surveillance and a process of mass capture that produced non-citizens, revealing the surprising dynamism of non-citizenship constantly regulated and monitored, made and remade, by an anxious state. The first mass use of identification photography in Canada, they make up the largest archive of images of Chinese migrants in the country, including people who stood no chance of being photographed otherwise. But CI 9s generated far more information than could be processed, and there is nothing straightforward about the knowledge that they purported to contain. Cho finds traces of alternate forms of kinship in the archive as well as evidence of the ways that families were separated. In attending to the particularities of these images and documents, Mass Capture uncovers the alternative story that lies in the refusals and resistances enacted by the mass captured. Illustrated with painstakingly reconstituted digital reproductions of the microfilm record, Mass Capture reclaims the CI 9s as more than documents of racist repression, suggesting the possibilities for beauty and dignity in the archive, for captivation as well as capture.

The problem of estimating animal abundance is common in wildlife management and environmental impact assessment. Capture-recapture and removal methods are often used to estimate population size. Statistical Inference From Capture Data On Closed Animal Populations, a monograph by Otis et al. (1978), provides us with a comprehensive synthesis of much of the wildlife and statistical literature on the methods, as well as some extensions of the general theory. In our primer, we focus on capture-recapture and removal methods for trapping studies in which a population is assumed to be closed and do not treat open-population models, such as the Jolly-Seber model, or catch-effort methods in any detail. The primer, written for students interested in population estimation, is intended for use with the more theoretical monograph.