Monthly Archives: August 2010

Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon

Margaret Mead: Making of an American Icon by Nancy C. Lutkehaus “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”–Margaret Mead This quotation–found on posters and bumper stickers, and adopted as the motto for hundreds of organizations worldwide–speaks to the global influence and legacy of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78). In this insightful and revealing book, Nancy Lutkehaus explains how and why Mead became the best-known anthropologist and female public intellectual in twentieth-century America....

Critical play: radical game design

Critical play: radical game design by Mary Flanagan For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping...

Ruin of the Roman Empire

The Ruin of the Roman Empire by James J. O’Donnell The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi­terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. It was a looking-glass world, where some Romans ideal­ized the Persian emperor while barbarian kings in Italy and France worked tirelessly to save the pieces of the Roman dream they had inherited. At the center...

Architecture as philosophy: the work of Imre Makovecz

Architecture as philosophy: the work of Imre Makovecz by Imre Makovecz At the start of this book Imre Makovecz gently criticises the commentators who first brought his work to the West. He is grateful to them of course, but he claims they only half understood, simplifying and misinterpreting. They presented him as a heroic rebel against the communist system, rather than seeing his battle against a larger enemy that we all still face: this he calls impersonal intelligence. When he...

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