Everyday Freedom

There’s a glaring vacuum in the 2024 political debate—No party or candidate offers a governing vision that deals with the root causes of alienation and failure. Something basic is missing in our culture. Americans know it. Nothing much works as it should. Simple daily choices seem impossible, or fraught with peril. In the workplace, we walk on eggshells. Big projects—say, modernizing infrastructure—get stalled in years of review. Endemic social problems such as homelessness become, well, more endemic. Everyday Freedom pinpoints the source of powerlessness that is fraying American culture and causing public failure, and offers a bold vision of simpler governing frameworks to re-empower Americans in their daily choices. “Everyday Freedom shows us how to break out of the spiral of decreasing trust, confidence, and capability,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt concludes, “and re-invigorate our institutions, our governments, and ourselves.” Everyday Freedom diagnoses our collective futility as resulting from a deliberate change in governing philosophy: The assault on authority after the 1960s, aimed at enhancing freedom, instead created a plague of powerlessness. The teacher in the classroom, the principal in a school, the nurse in the hospital, the official in Washington, the parent on a field trip, the head of a local charity or church…all have their hands tied. Things don’t work, and Americans have lost the freedom to be themselves. That’s the main reason America is in a downward spiral of alienation and extremism. Who has a vision to revive hope and action? Not political leaders, who are picking the scab of resentment. Social media gets rich selling distrust. Stop the Steal! Defund the Police! Everyday Freedom, in the tradition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, offers a radical vision for change: Re-empower Americans in their everyday choices. The massive legal structures erected since the 1960s were based on flawed notions that human judgment could be replaced by elaborate dictates. Area by area, these failed structures must be replaced with simpler frameworks activated by human responsibility and accountability. Nothing will work sensibly until Americans are free to draw on their skills, intuitions and values when confronting daily challenges. This is the only cure to alienation. This is also the only way to deliver good government. Philip Howard’s understanding of the essential role of human agency has been embraced by some of America’s leading economists, jurists, social psychologists and philosophers.

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

‘Freedom’ is one of the most fiercely contested words in contemporary global experience. This book provides an up-to-date overview from an anthropological perspective of the diverse ways in which freedom is understood and practised in everyday life, including the emergent relationships between governance, autonomy and liberty. The contributors offer a wealth of ethnographic insight from a variety of geographic, cultural and political contexts. Taken together the essays constitute a radical challenge to assumptions about what freedom means in today’s world.

This book reclaims for Wales the history and culture of a music that eventually emerged as jazz in the 1920s, its tendrils and roots extending back to slave songs and abolition campaign songs, and Swansea’s long-forgotten connection with Cincinnati, Ohio. The main themes of the book are to illustrate and emphasise the strong links between emerging African American music in the USA and the development of jazz in mainstream popular culture in Wales; the emancipation and contribution of Welsh women to the music and its social-cultural heritage; and an historical appraisal as the music journeyed towards the Second World War and into living memory. The jazz story is set amid the politics, socio-cultural and feminist history of the time from whence the music emerged – which begs the question ‘When Was Jazz?’ (to echo Gwyn A. Williams in 1985, who asked ‘When Was Wales?’). If jazz is described as ‘the music of protest and rebellion’, then there was certainly plenty going on during the jazz age in Wales.

Why do we choose specific modes of transport and what are the perceived rationalities for our choice? How are different theoretical concepts within mobility research actually perceived and lived in everyday life? At this book's core is a conceptual and empirical contribution to critical mobility research. It focuses on the tension between freedom and unfreedom, articulated through the dichotomy between individuality and community, as well as critical perspectives on the multitude of unintended consequences of mobility. In a range of everyday life narratives, this tension is analyzed through the concept of 'structural stories'. In teasing out the ambivalences of late modern everyday life, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen exposes how mobility both generates and helps to overcome and live with these ambivalences.

In a culture driven by advertising, convenience, and weight-loss gimmicks, our relationship with food has become sadly out-of touch. Yoga teacher Myra Lewin encourages us to slow down and cultivate a healthy relationship with what we put in our bodies. Drawing from the basic principles of Ayurveda and Yoga, Freedom in Your Relationship to Food is a simple and effective guide to enhancing your relationship with food and the process of eating. Including lists of foods to seek out or avoid, simple breathing and meditation exercises, and practical recipes, this book will help you overcome mental and physical obstacles to attain excellent health.

Forewords by Emmy Rossum and Jennifer Garner Ditch cravings and love your lifestyle with this body-positive approach to health and wellness In her bestselling book Body Love, Kelly LeVeque shared how the Fab Four—protein, fat, fiber, and greens—can transform your health, your body, and your relationship with food. Now, in Body Love Every Day, Kelly gives you an action plan to adopt the Fab Four lifestyle in the way that’s right for you. For a tailored approach, she has created comprehensive 21-day plans for four different archetypal women: • The Girl on the Go wants a plan that’s flexible enough to work with her busy schedule. Kelly shares on-the-go hacks for when you’re out and about or traveling, delicious 15-minute meals, and simple strategies to stay balanced every day. • The Domestic Goddess is dedicated to building a healthy home through cooking with and using clean products. Kelly shows you how to elevate your cooking and home to healthier heights. • The Plant-Based Devotee wants to incorporate the Fab Four into her vegetarian or vegan diet. With over forty delectable plant-based recipes, Kelly gives you a plan to stay nourished and fueled while staying committed to your lifestyle. • The Red-Carpet Ready gal wants to look her best for her next big event. Rock your version of the red carpet with the same strategies Kelly uses with her A-list celebrity clients, including recipes to debloat and brighten skin, workouts to tighten and tone, and ideal eating windows to help boost results. Whether you’re one of these archetypes or a combination of them, Body Love Every Day provides a plan to help you achieve natural wellness for the body, mind, and soul. You’ll find recipes and nutrition information for every meal, exercise and movement for every day, stress management and energy recharge for nights and weekends, and emotional support to get you through the inevitable tough times. Whether you’re looking to live healthier or drop a jean size, boost your fitness or just feel better, Body Love Every Day is your guide to success.

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles&—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.