Collecting Lives

On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become. While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data’s revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.

Unlike most collectors of European modernism, the Ganzes had the breadth of imagination to realize that certain young Americans were the true heirs of Picasso. With an unerring eye (sharpened by exhaustive study), they chose Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella at the beginning of their careers, and then moved on to champion Eva Hesse. In this book of essays by John Richardson, Leo Steinberg, David Sylvester, Judith Goldman, Roberta Bernstein, Linda Shearer, and others, we learn about the art and artists in the collection, as well as the risks and commitments the Ganzes made in establishing these artists we now hail as among the masters of contemporary art.

Poetry. Madelyn Garner and Andrea Watson offer an intriguing glimpse into the anthropology of collecting—what people love, value, and even obsess about in the passionate and occasionally quirky world of collecting. This fascinating anthology offers poems by emerging and established writers, including Denise Duhamel, Kimiko Hahn, Jane Hirshfield, Pattiann Rogers, David Trinidad, Christopher Buckley, Jonathan Rice, and Gary Young. Introduced by Bill Brown, Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of English and the visual arts at the University of Chicago, a leading expert on the practice and art of collecting, the book provides crucial insights into the transformative nature of collecting through the singular lens of poetics. COLLECTING LIFE is a must-read for writers, artists, collectors, and educators.

In The Rules of Life , Richard Templar brings together 106 practical rules that happy, successful people follow, even if they've never thought about it. These are realistic, commonsense things you can do differently, starting today... small things that make a powerful difference. Templar offers real wisdom on telling the difference between what's important and what isn't... focusing on changes you really can make... using your intuition... learning positive lessons from your regrets... having great dreams and making practical plans... staying young... forgiving without becoming a pushover. The first edition of The Rules of Life became a global phenomenon, topping bestseller charts around the world. This new, even better, edition includes nine brand-new rules to take you further, faster. Follow The Rules of Life. You'll feel better. You'll be a better friend, partner, and parent. And you'll leave the world a better place. Richard Templar's The Rules of Parenting, Expanded Edition presents the principles to follow which you can adapt to suit you and your children. Templar -- author of The Rules of Life and many other best-sellers -- has brought together 100+ parenting tips you can start using instantly. Now updated and expanded with 10 brand-new rules, Templar's rules address everything you need to know from start to finish. Beginning with the first rule "Relax" and continuing through 100+ rules, this book presents a guide to everything a parent needs to know from toddling, school, boyfriends or girlfriends, through driving lessons and college. The book begins with a section that covers the most important rules, The Rules for Staying Sane. The rest of the sections cover some of the big questions of parenting, including the Attitude Rules, the Discipline Rules, the Sibling Rules, the School Rules, the Teenage Rules, the Crisis Rules, all the way up to the Grown-up Rules.

Plutarch, later named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, c. 46 - 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. Plutarch lived most of his life at Chaeronea, and his duties as the senior of the two priests of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi (where he was responsible for interpreting the auguries of the Pythia) apparently occupied little of his time. He led an active social and civic life while producing an extensive body of writing, much of which survived. By his writings and lectures Plutarch became a celebrity in the Roman Empire. At his country estate, guests from all over the empire congregated for serious conversation, presided over by Plutarch in his marble chair. Many of these dialogues were recorded and published, and the 78 essays and other works which have survived are now known collectively as the Moralia. Plutarch's best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices. The surviving Lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek Life and one Roman Life, as well as four unpaired single Lives. Some of the Lives, such as those of Heracles, Philip II of Macedon and Scipio Africanus, no longer exist; many of the remaining Lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae or have been tampered with by later writers. Extant Lives include those on Aristides, Pericles, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Cato the Younger, Mark Antony, and Marcus Junius Brutus, all of which are included here.

From popular TV correspondent and writer Rocca comes a charmingly irreverent and rigorously researched book that celebrates the dead people who made life worth living.