Still In The City

A body is found on the side of a highway. It goes missing, making its way, over the course of one early winter night, all around the northern town of Sudbury and through the lives and dreams of eleven very different people, all damaged in some way, eventually bringing them together in a strange moment of violence.

Still, in the City is a collection of stories about the practice of urban Buddhism—when a New York City subway becomes a mobile temple, when Los Angeles traffic becomes a vehicle for awakening, when a Fifth Avenue sidewalk offers a spiritual path through craving, generosity, and sorrow. The instructions offered here for exploring mindfulness in and around our cities are written to be accessible, whether you’ve practiced a lot or a little. Perhaps you’ve returned home from a retreat and want to hold the attention and intention gained from pausing and experiencing the silence. Or perhaps you practice mindfulness and don’t call it Buddhism, or you are just curious about what mindfulness is all about. Still, in the City will speak to you. Practicing in the city comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities, and this book is attuned to both, offering guidance by teachers who see mindfulness not only as an intention for self-acceptance and relief of stress, but also as awareness that leads to dissatisfaction and that inspires our desire for deeper understanding and change. Dedicated to using their practice to make a difference not only in their own lives but also those of others, the authors speak of their involvement with their cities’ diverse communities, and their experience belies the notion that western Buddhists are of an age and race and class. There is amazing clarity in stillness, and the opportunity for a skillful response rather than a reaction, even to injustice. And there is the possibility of equanimity and of freedom, everywhere and for all.

Twenty years after her sharp, seminal first book Sex and the City reshaped the landscape of pop culture and dating with its fly-on-the-wall look at the mating rituals of the Manhattan elite, the trailblazing Candace Bushnell delivers a new book on the highs and lows of sex and dating after fifty. Set between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a country enclave known as The Village, Is There Still Sex in the City? gathers Bushnell’s signature short, sharp, satirical commentaries on the love and dating habits of middle-aged men and women as they continue to navigate the ever-modernizing world of relationships. Throughout, Bushnell documents twenty-first century dating phenomena, such as the “Unintended Cub Situation” in which a sensible older woman suddenly becomes the love interest of a much younger man, the “Mona Lisa” Treatment — a vaginal restorative surgery often recommended to middle-aged women — and what it’s really like to go on Tinder dates as a fifty-something divorcée. Bushnell also updates one of her most celebrated stories from Sex and the City, about “Bicycle Boys,” a breed of New York man who is always trying to bring his bike up to women’s apartments. Once an anomaly, Bushnell charts their new ubiquitousness, in addition to where, and how, to do your own man stalking via bicycle (and whether or not it’s worth it).

Waldinger examines why African-Americans have fared so poorly in securing unskilled jobs in the postwar era and why new immigrants have done so well. Using New York to look at the relationships among race, immigration, and social mobility, Waldinger offers a new understanding of a serious social problem and fresh approaches to attacking it.

A candid, savvy, inspiring, and often hilarious memoir by one of America's most fearless political leaders.

Milwaukeeans greeted the advent of World War II with the same determination as other Americans. Everyone felt the effect of the war, whether through concern for loved ones in danger, longer work hours, consumer shortages, or participation in war service organizations and drives. Men and women workers produced the essential goods necessary for victory—the vehicles, weapons, munitions, and components for all the machinery of war. But even in wartime there were labor conflicts, fueled by the sacrifices and tensions of wartime life. A City at War focuses on the experience of working men and women in a community that was not a wartime boom town. It looks at the stands of the CIO and the AFL against low wartime wages, and at women in unionized factories facing the perceptions and goals of male workers, union leaders, and society itself. Here is a social history of wartime Milwaukee and its workers as they laid the groundwork for a secure postwar future.

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.