Not Neutral

"Not Neutral: For Every Place Its Story" by Rios Clementi Hale Studios is a sumptuous and massive monograph that takes a comprehensive look at the award-winning, Los Angeles-based architectural firm and its cross-disciplinary work over the last thirty years. Since 1985, the architects, landscape architects, planners, and urban, interior, exhibit, graphic, and product designers at Rios Clementi Hale Studios have been creating buildings, places, and products that are thoughtful, effective, and beautiful. Their projects range in scope and scale from their award-winning urban design for Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles, to one-of-a-kind custom residential homes and gardens, and also to their unique housewares and products they create through their Not Neutral retail brand. Much of their work at all scales, shows their clever use of pattern, color, and materiality in innovative and creative ways. This book organizes the range of diverse projects not in a conventional chronological way, but instead into poetic chapters that evoke meaning and seek commonality such as: Nature in the City, Dreaming Cities, Wishing & Praying, and Patterns in the Wild. While incredibly diverse in form and function, Rios Clementi Hale Studios' projects share an underlying goal of approaching each project with the guiding principle that "For Every Place, Its Story." As Frances Anderton writes in her introduction: "The firm explicitly repudiates the one-size-fits-all "signature" approach that they see emanating from too many celebrated architects' offices. For them the goal is precise customization." Indeed, for Rios Clementi Hale Studios, finding the authentic narrative that drives each project has resulted in a body of work that is both inspiring and unexpected.

All organisms--from the AIDS virus, to bacteria, to fish, to humans--must evolve to survive. Despite the central place of evolution within biology, there are many things that are still poorly understood. For Charles Darwin, the driving force behind all evolution was natural selection. More recently, evolutionary biologists have considered that many mutations are essentially neutral with respect to natural selection. Many questions remain. Are molecular differences between species adaptive? Are differences within species adaptive? Modern biotechnology has enabled us to identify precisely the actual DNA structure from many individuals within a population, and thus to see how these DNA sequences have changed over time and to answer some of these questions. At the same time, this knowledge poses new challenges to our ability to understand the observed patterns. This exciting volume outlines the biological problems, provides new perspectives on theoretical treatments of the consequences of natural selection, examines the consequences of molecular data, and relates molecular events to speciation. Every evolutionary biologist will find it of interest.

International tax regimes and practices are heavily criticized for failing to fairly levy corporate tax on giant multinational taxpayers in the current globalized and digitalized world. This important and far-seeing book demonstrates how formulary apportionment (FA) – an approach by which a multinational corporation pays each jurisdiction’s corporate tax based on the share of its worldwide income allocated to that jurisdiction – can achieve the much-sought goal of aligning value creation and taxation. The author, through an intensive analysis of the European Union’s (EU’s) Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) Directive Proposal(s) and comparison to the United States (US’s) formulary apportionment experience, shows how the perceived problems with an FA system can be overcome and lays out the necessary elements for its feasibility. With detailed attention to the debates around formulary apportionment and its theoretical foundations, the book provides a blueprint for rebuilding the normative framework for the EU’s tax reform by clearly analysing the implications of the following and more: theorising public benefits to be represented by taxation; reorganising different economic theories about tax neutrality and tax justice; advancing the comparative legal research methodology to analyse law reform by combining the functional approach and the problem-solving approach; designing the logical formulary apportionment system for digital economy; ensuring the removal of the incentive for multinationals to shift reported income to low-tax locations; reducing the tax system’s complexity and the administrative burden it imposes on firms; eliminating transfer pricing complexity for intra-firm transactions; achieving equal weighting of the sales factor, the labour factor, and the asset factor in the formula; application of ‘destination-based’ rule for attributing the sales factor; and replacing the traditional permanent establishment nexus with a ‘factor presence nexus’. The presentation incorporates extensive comparison between the EU’s formulary apportionment tax reform option and FA systems existing in the United States (US) at state level, including reference to relevant US case law and legislation. As a possible option to address the problem of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), formulary apportionment is gaining increasing acceptance and attention. This book will prove invaluable to taxation authorities, tax practitioners, and scholars in its deeply informed and systematic guidance on good practices and prevention of problematic experiences in establishing and implementing an effective and market-neutral FA system.

Neutrality has, supposedly, long been a pillar of the Irish national identity – a policy that the country has proudly presented on the world stage. But, examining the concept reveals it to be a vague and elastic notion – one that, throughout history, various governments have been happy to stretch or, in some cases, abandon entirely. Today, warfare has expanded to include cyberattacks, environmental concerns, election interference and disinformation. If our traditional idea of warfare is changing, should our idea of neutrality change too? In this timely and thought-provoking examination of a core tenet of Irish society, Conor Gallagher explores the practical and ethical implications of choosing a side, asking: in the face of aggression, is it right to sit back and do nothing?

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the wars in Yugoslavia radically changed the security environment in Europe and Central Asia. Some predictions assumed the emerging unipolarity of the liberal world order would end neutrality policies in East and West, but, as this volume shows, this was not the case. While some traditional Cold War neutrals like Sweden and Finland have been edging closer to security alignment with western institutions, there are others like Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, and Malta that remained committed to their traditional nonaligned foreign policy approaches. More importantly, there are areas of Eurasia that developed new forms of neutrality policies, most of them only noticed on the margins of academic discourse. This is the first book to systematically explore this “new neutralism” of the Post-Cold War. In part one, the book analyzes contemporary neutrality discourse on several levels like international organizations (UN, ASEAN), diplomacy, and academic theory. Part two discusses neutrality-related policy developments in Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Mongolia. Together, the 15 chapters show how on this vast, connected landmass references to neutrality have remained a staple of international politics.

A joyful, imagistic discovery of woman as speaker and subject. As a woman, a black, and a lesbian, Brand arrives at a rigorous and nakedly ruthless reclamation of the poetic.

The suicidal proclivity of our time, writes the acclaimed philosopher J. Budziszewski, is to deny the obvious. Our hearts are riddled with desires that oppose their deepest longings, because we demand to have happiness on terms that make happiness impossible. Why? And what can we do about it? Budziszewski addresses these vital questions in his brilliantly persuasive new book, The Line Through the Heart. The answers can be discovered in an exploration of natural law—a venture that, with Budziszewski as our expert guide, takes us through politics, religion, ethics, law, philosophy, and more. Natural law, the author states plainly but provocatively, is a fact about human beings; as surely as we have hands and feet, we have the foundational principles of good and evil woven into the fabric of our minds. From this elemental fact emerges a natural law theory that unfolds as part of a careful study of the human person. Thus, Budziszewski shows, natural law forms a common ground for humanity. But this common ground is slippery. While natural law is truly an observable part of human nature, human beings are hell-bent—quite literally—on ignoring it. The mere mention of the obligations imposed on man by his nature will send him into a rage. In this sense, The Line Through the Heart explores natural law as not simply a fact and a theory but also a sign of contradiction. While investigating the natural law and its implications, Budziszewski boldly confronts—and offers a newly integrated view of—a wide range of contemporary issues, including abortion, evolution, euthanasia, capital punishment, the courts, and the ersatz state religion being built in the name of religious toleration. Written in Budziszewski’s usual crystalline style, The Line Through the Heart makes clear that natural law is a matter of concern not merely to scholars; it touches how each of us lives, and how all of us live together. His profoundly important examination of this subject helps us make sense of why habits that run against our nature have become second nature, and why our world seems to be going mad.

This "intense reading experience"* is a Printz Honor Book. Shawn McDaniel's life is not what it may seem to anyone looking at him. He is glued to his wheelchair, unable to voluntarily move a muscle—he can't even move his eyes. For all Shawn's father knows, his son may be suffering. Shawn may want a release. And as long as he is unable to communicate his true feelings to his father, Shawn's life is in danger. To the world, Shawn's senses seem dead. Within these pages, however, we meet a side of him that no one else has seen—a spirit that is rich beyond imagining, breathing life. *Booklist starred review