Material World

A photo-journey through the homes and lives of 30 families, revealing culture and economic levels around the world.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. • Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates. Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.

This book draws on the tools of science and technology studies and economic sociology to reconceptualize the intersection of economy and technology, suggesting materiality - the idea that social existence involves not only actors and social relations but also objects - as the theoretical point of convergence.

Tired of the clichés often trotted out about craft, Perri Lewis makes it her task to bring the world of making into the 21st century. In Material World, Perri enlists the help of luminaries from the worlds of art, craft, design and fashion to share their knowledge and advice. Among these include Rob Ryan, Emma Bridgewater, Grayson Perry, Philip Treacy, Tatty Devine, Topshop and Tracey Emin. Instead of just giving the reader individual projects, you can learn the techniques for crafts such as paper-cutting, dress-making, printing, encrusting, leather work and tailoring. However, if you prefer more guidance, there are 15 projects to make, including découpage shoes, a patchwork Louis chair and a printed scarf. With the compiled words of wisdom of these experts, and Perri's own timeless advice, you'll be up and running with scissors in no time.

Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology provocatively argues that technology is best understood as an otherworldly or spiritual force. Under its influence, humans are fast becoming spirit-like creatures, beings who assume their bodies are incidental to what it means to be human and the "real world" an accidental quality of the human condition. Technology authorizes such an understanding and legitimates a manner of action that obscures the centrality of embodiment and its significance. Gil Germain challenges many of the assumptions underpinning the technological worldview through a reading of leading contemporary theorists who have addressed the interconnection between technology and disembodiment. The book both reveals and contests the multifarious ways in which technology's spiritual thrust is manifested in contemporary thought and practice. While respecting technology's hold on modernity and its predisposition toward disembodiment, Germain gives important reasons why this inclination toward spiritizaiion ought to be resisted and what shape this resistance must take if it is to be meaningful. Gil Germain is associate professor of political studies at the University of Prince Edward Book jacket.

A noted philosopher proposes a naturalistic (rather than supernaturalistic) way to solve the "really hard problem": how to live in a meaningful way—how to live a life that really matters—even as a finite material being living in a material world. If consciousness is "the hard problem" in mind science—explaining how the amazing private world of consciousness emerges from neuronal activity—then "the really hard problem," writes Owen Flanagan in this provocative book, is explaining how meaning is possible in the material world. How can we make sense of the magic and mystery of life naturalistically, without an appeal to the supernatural? How do we say truthful and enchanting things about being human if we accept the fact that we are finite material beings living in a material world, or, in Flanagan's description, short-lived pieces of organized cells and tissue? Flanagan's answer is both naturalistic and enchanting. We all wish to live in a meaningful way, to live a life that really matters, to flourish, to achieve eudaimonia—to be a "happy spirit." Flanagan calls his "empirical-normative" inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing eudaimonics. Eudaimonics, systematic philosophical investigation that is continuous with science, is the naturalist's response to those who say that science has robbed the world of the meaning that fantastical, wishful stories once provided. Flanagan draws on philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology, as well as on transformative mindfulness and self-cultivation practices that come from such nontheistic spiritual traditions as Buddhism, Confucianism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, in his quest. He gathers from these disciplines knowledge that will help us understand the nature, causes, and constituents of well-being and advance human flourishing. Eudaimonics can help us find out how to make a difference, how to contribute to the accumulation of good effects—how to live a meaningful life.

A collection of essays that examine early American cultural, political, and social history through a material lens, exploring the meanings of objects ranging from artworks and domestic furnishings to Penn's Treaty Tree.

A collection of essays from leading figures in numerous fields exploring the ways human beings have perceived, shaped, and interpreted the material world