bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Philosophy and the Art of Human Flourishing
Authors: Moody-Adams Michele
Published: November 2022

Philosophy best supports and advances human flourishing when it acknowledges and deepens understanding of the contributions that art can make to a satisfying and well-lived life. Philosophers who promote what Arthur Danto called the “disenfranchisement of art” thus divert us from a critical source of human flourishing. Art can promote constructive transformations in individual lives, encourage and sustain social and political reconciliation, and provide unmatched consolation in response to suffering and adversity. Yet, as John Dewey urged, if communities are to fully realize the contributions that art can make to human well-being, they must find ways to restore continuity between art and everyday experience. This means acknowledging that art is the exercise and application of imagination, creativity, and skill in many domains of interest and concern that are not limited to the preoccupations of the “fine arts.” Further, it means recognizing that living well is itself an art that draws on ways of knowing, and sometimes creatively reimagining, the world that are not accessible except by means of art. If individuals and societies hope to promote human flourishing, they must therefore restore continuity between art and “everyday” experience in their individual lives, as well as in the social, political, and economic institutions within which they lead their lives.
Media-ting Happiness
Authors: Fischer Lucy
Published: November 2022

Whether cinema can contribute to human flourishing is an open question. If we consider fiction/narrative film, two usual functions are assigned to it: entertainment and art. In arguing for cinema’s role in encouraging human wellness, a paradigm shift is required—imagining the medium as part of the “health care system.” If one chooses to make that case, the question arises as to how movies might do so. Are the best texts those that are predominantly joyful and filled with characters who exude positive emotions and qualities? Or are the best those in which realistic, multi-faceted characters fight to achieve happiness, and the viewer must endure their travails to enjoy their eventual success (e.g., The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The main focus of this chapter will be on two films that directly consider the issue of human satisfaction. Happy-Go-Lucky concerns a young woman who is perennially content, even when encountering those who are troubled or constitutionally downcast. Hector and the Search for Happiness concerns a male psychiatrist who is dissatisfied with his life and undertakes a worldwide quest for the secret to contentment.
Cinema and Creative Community
Authors: Andrew Dudley
Published: November 2022

The arts are the fruit and the means of human flourishing. Oddly, this is most apparent during bleak periods. Living in an alarming moment, we should look to earlier moments that seemed dire to those who lived, or failed to live, through them. Auden’s Age of Anxiety, 1935–1947, witnessed the depression, WWII, the Camps, and the A-Bombs. Yet art historians Erwin Panofsky and André Malraux latched onto the cinema as the most promising site for human aspirations because of its popularity and its communal aesthetics. This I trace in inspiring films of that era, and in the enterprise of filmmaking itself, where a potential for social organization exists in “Creative Community.” Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, and John Ford provide examples of an attitude toward mass art that we must measure up to today. Panofsky and Malraux are gone; who will point us to an art in which we can have hope?
Fiendish DevicesHuman Flourishing and the Black Watching Subject
Authors: Scott Ellen C.
Published: November 2022

This chapter explores the possibility of interrogative film criticism as a means for Black flourishing, focusing on an under-heralded Black femme film critic, Almena Davis, editor of the 1940s and 1950s Black newspaper, the Los Angeles Tribune. In her writing, which mixed consideration of film, politics, her children, her dogs, and her “premenstrual tension,” it was precisely her embodied, strident unmasking of Hollywood’s toxic white placidity and plasticity that made her own liminal, gender-porous self-hood legible. Her loose play with Hollywood constructions gave place for the noir, the avant-garde, and the satirical. Davis provides a case study of Black femme, interrogative criticism as a way of life: un-abating, avowedly bitter, borderline hysterical critique gives recourse for the marginalized Black subject watching “America” to draw therapy, life, and possibility. Davis’ model of daily, trenchant critique as self is vital now; we have as much to fear from fascisms of the screen today as we did in Davis’ time.
Sentimental MiseducationWomen Directors Coming of Age
Authors: White Patricia
Published: November 2022

Drawing on queer and feminist critiques of prescriptive forms of human flourishing, this chapter analyzes films by Greta Gerwig, Dee Rees, and Desirée Akhavan about young female selves at odds with social expectations. Women directors of independent films in the United States are increasing in numbers and earning wider recognition as mainstream Hollywood is scrutinized for its lack of diverse stories and storytellers. But their careers are often limited by a narrative that favors “coming of age,” both as subject matter of their films and as a script for their own emergence. This chapter shows how the thwarted heroine of Ladybird and the persecuted queer protagonists of Pariah and The Miseducation of Cameron Post engage and complicate developmental narratives of happiness and adjustment. It extends that reading to the filmmakers’ own professional strategies.
The Appointment and the First Days
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter discusses the process to appoint Luis Moreno Ocampo as the first ICC’s chief prosecutor. It presents his practice in Argentina as the deputy prosecutor of the “Trial of the Juntas” in 1985, other relevant cases as a national prosecutor, his international activities on anticorruption, and his experience as a visiting professor at Stanford University and Harvard University. It also describes Moreno Ocampo’s planning before taking office as the first chief prosecutor. How do establish priorities? At the same time, he had to recruit the personnel, define the policies, consolidate political and civil society support, and launch cases. The chapter discusses his meetings with experts, diplomats, NGOs, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Selecting DRC as the First Situation to Be Investigated
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter presents the implementation for the first time of a preliminary examination. It describes the proactive policy to identify a situation to be investigated, the criteria to select DRC as the gravest situation under ICC jurisdiction, and the information obtained to produce an Article 53 report, assessing the jurisdiction and admissibility requirements of the Rome Statute. The prosecution proposed that the lack of national proceedings made the situation admissible without the need to debate if the state was “unwilling” or “unable.” The chapter presents a two-step policy: a prosecution’s independent legal assessment of the court’s jurisdiction followed by activities to obtain cooperation to conduct the investigations. It explains the policy to invite states to refer situations to the ICC facilitating an agreement with the territorial state.
The ICC Shadow in the Uganda Situation
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter presents the discussions between concerned states and the UN to implement the ICC’s arrest warrants against the LRA’s leaders. The UN Security Council tasked the UN peacekeeper forces in the DRC and Sudan to contribute to the ICC arrest warrants’ enforcement. The frustration of the collective approach to arrest LRA leaders facilitated the opening of negotiations with Joseph Kony. The chapter presents the “Juba talks” initiated at Kony’s initiative. The UN Security Council established an agenda that requested peace and justice and the participation of states, the UN secretary-general, and the African Union (AU.) Acholi leaders and Invisible Children, participated in the events. The Juba talks succeeded in creating a multiparty understanding between South Sudan, Uganda, and the DRC, allowing a new interaction between the communities in Northern Uganda and the Ugandan government. The process ended the LRA’s crimes in Uganda, but since 2007, the group has terrorized other communities. Kony used the negotiation process to obtain resources, attacked his own representatives, and strengthened his militia by abducting more children, but this time in the DRC and the Central African Republic. The chapter proposes to evaluate the ICC’s impact on the LRA’s disruption as a part of the activities performed by different actors with conflicting agendas.
The Role of NGOs Referring the Central African Republic Situation
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter examines the jus ad Curiam decisions in the Central African Republic (CAR). It highlights the role of Goungaye Wanfiyo, a local NGO leader that promoted a referral and became the CAR representative before the court. His example disturbs the broad insight that international organizations serve exclusively as vehicles for major-power influence. For the first time, the Office of the Prosecutor has to analyze national relevant proceedings. The chapter presents a debate on the scope of the Prosecution and pre-trial chamber respective authority during the preliminary examination process.
The Office of the Prosecutor Using Its Proprio Motu Authority in Kenya
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter discusses the 2008 Kenya’s post-election violence when top political leaders allegedly committed crimes against humanity to obtain authority. For the first time, the prosecutor used proprio motu authority to trigger the Court intervention. The pre-trial chamber authorized the investigation. Dissipating the reservations during the Rome Conference, the jus ad Curiam independent decisions were accepted even by Kenya’s president and prime minister. A jus ad Curiae decision, to request and to issue summons to appear against six individuals, triggered the first challenge to the admissibility of a case presented by a state. Pre-trial and appeal chambers issued groundbreaking decisions on complementarity. The judges considered that the Kenyan investigations were focused on lower-level perpetrators and the inactivity against the six suspects rendered the case admissible. The rulings consolidated the jurisprudence on “inactivity,” without analyzing “inability” or “unwillingness” and confirmed the prosecution decisions on jurisdiction. The suspects appeared voluntarily, and the pre-trial chamber confirmed the charges against four of them. Two of them, leaders of the opposite camps in 2008, created a ticket and won the 2013 election. They continued appearing before the court as president and vice president, and Kenya remains a Rome Statute’ state party. The chapter describes how a divided UN Security Council rejected the application of Article 16 to suspend the case, and the Assembly of States Parties’ decision to amend the statute to facilitate the trials. The witnesses disappeared or recanted their testimonies, and finally, the cases were vacated.
The Preliminary Examinations Decisions Not to Open an Investigation
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter presents three Office of the Prosecutor jus ad Curiam’s decisions considering that the statute’s requirements to open an investigation were not fulfilled: (a) Venezuela, (b) UK personnel in Iraq, and (c) Palestine. a) the information available in 2006 did not provide a reasonable basis to believe that a crime against humanity was committed in Venezuela. b) the willful killings allegedly committed by UK personnel in Iraq did not reach the specific gravity threshold established by Article 8(1). c) Regarding Palestine, the preliminary examination focused on the Article 12 requirement that a “state” must accept International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction. The chapter describes the Office of the Prosecutor consultations and its decision. After the end of Moreno Ocampo’s tenure, the Office of the Prosecutor reopened these preliminary examinations to analyze new information.
The ICC Investigation in Afghanistan
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

This chapter presents one of the consequences of jus ad Bellum decisions in Afghanistan and Iraq as the War on Terror provides incentives to protect the US personnel involved in war crimes and to oppose justice. It distinguishes three policies: first, cover-up and denial; second, minimizing, presenting the facts as isolated incidents originated in a few rogue subordinates that would be punished; and third, forget the past and focus on the future. The first two phases happened during the Bush administration; the Obama presidency developed the third one. President Trump stretched the protection policy and “designated” the prosecutor and the head of the Jurisdiction Division as if they were terrorists “for having directly engaged in an effort to investigate US personnel.” Beyond the different US presidents’ personalities, there is a constant: US strategy to address international terrorism is in open confrontation with any independent judicial scrutiny.
Jus ad Curiam and Jus ad Bellum Decisions in Syria
Authors: Ocampo Luis Moreno
Published: November 2022

The chapter presents the inability of the UN Security Council to maintain peace and security in Syria. The P-5 consensus reached in Libya disappeared in a few months. The Syrian government attacked its own citizens and the United States promoted the opposition, and adopted a jus ad Bellum decision in Syria supporting proxy forces. Russia supported President Assad and condemned foreign armies’ interventions in a sovereign country to produce a regime change. However, in September 2013, President Putin facilitated an agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. For a few months, the council dynamic changed, and it adopted resolutions by consensus on Syria demanding justice and access to humanitarian assistance. But the conflict in Ukraine created a political confrontation between Western countries and Russia affecting the council dynamics. On January 2013, Switzerland took the lead and sent a letter to the UN Security Council on behalf of fifty-seven states calling for referring Syria to the ICC. The United States requested informally to Switzerland to suspend the request. In 2014, after the Ukraine conflict started, France tabled a referral to the ICC. This time, the US supported the referral forcing Russia and China to use their veto power to stop the initiative. Meanwhile, the Islamic State was taking control of parts of Syria. The US Congress adopted a jus ad Bellum decision to use armed forces against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups in Syria without the Assad government’s consent. President Obama consolidated a new blueprint: a combination of high-tech attacks and proxy forces in the ground as a new permanent state of war in some nations. Syria became a contained global war by proxy. In 2015, after a brutal terrorist attack in Paris, the UN Security Council overcame the divisions and by consensus adopted Resolution 2249, authorizing “all necessary means” against the Islamic State in Syria. The War on Terror became a council policy.
Ordinary Talk about Ordinary Trouble
Authors: Zoloth Laurie
Published: November 2022

In the final chapter, I consider the problem of error and the role of memory in Jewish ethics and turn to the work of Walter Benjamin to comment on a Talmudic story about Lot’s wife. We think about a case of two children, discussed several years apart, and consider how a mistake made in the first case affects our judgment in the second case. That thinking is initiated by action and that it needs a second interpretive look is the premise of this book. The gesture of medicine is surely shaped by this and the practice of bioethics as a discipline as well. In this chapter, I consider the practices of memory, and second thoughts. We will look at two cases where intuitions proved incorrect, and where family, loyalty, and the boundless acts of love played a central role in the ethical process of decision making.
Conclusion
Authors: Zoloth Laurie
Published: November 2022

I conclude by considering the problems of memory in the work of religious ethics and bioethics. I reflect on how memory itself is a “second text,” and how the work bioethics is to have a second, reflective opinion. This chapter considers how better and more complete attention to issue of race, class, and ethnicity are important in the practice of bioethics and how our theoretical work must be done with such attention. I consider the act of translation—a moral act—as a metaphor for what we do when we do bioethics consultation when we “translate” the languages of families into the language of the clinic and when we “translate” the language of medicine into words that families can understand, and when all of this is again restated in moral language.
Locked Out
Authors: Brier Bob
Published: November 2022

As Carter proceeded with the excavation of the tomb, he encountered several difficulties, both logistical and political. The four wood shrines that surrounded Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus were extremely fragile and had to be dismantled, but they nearly filled the Burial Chamber, leaving little room to work. This chapter describes the ingenious system Carter’s team devised to successfully take apart the four nested shrines, and then goes on to describe Carter’s even greater political difficulties. He and Carnarvon had sold the exclusive rights to the Tutankhamun story to the Times of London, shutting out Egyptian journalists, who were furious. With political pressure being put on Carter, he walked out and refused to work in the tomb. The Antiquities Service responded by locking him out. The chapter ends with Carter sailing off to America for a lecture tour with the problem unresolved and the lid of the sarcophagus literally suspended in air.
Scanning Tutankhamun
Authors: Brier Bob
Published: November 2022

In recent times, Tutankhamun’s mummy was CAT-scanned, yielding some definitive results but also some controversial ones. On the definitive side, the scans showed that Tutankhamun did not die from a blow to the back of the head, as had been theorized; there was no evidence of an injury to the skull. The chapter discusses the history of the murder theory and why it had been suggested. Some of the researchers on the scanning project suggested that the scans showed that Tutankhamun suffered from a clubbed foot that would have caused him to walk on the side of his foot. This claim is discussed and rejected. Another claim that is mentioned is that Tutankhamun may have died from a broken femur; the reasons for rejecting this claim are given.
The Third Millennium BCE: Late Neolithic Sign Systems
Authors: Demattè Paola
Published: November 2022

This chapter focuses on the material evidence relating to the origin of Chinese writing during the Late Neolithic. It concentrates on third millennium BCE inscribed material excavated in coastal and inland contexts, such as Dawenkou, Liangzhu, Shijiahe, Longshan and Taosi with the intent of showing how the interaction between these cultures led to the sharing of graphic signs and eventually to the emergence of a common (non-glottic) signing system.
Characteristics of Shang Writing
Authors: Demattè Paola
Published: November 2022

This chapter highlights the main grammatological and syntactic characteristics of Late Shang writing as expressed in shell and bone and bronze inscriptions. Here, the objective is to highlight the complexity and maturity of the script and to signal that it is unlikely to have appeared in these advanced forms without a significant evolution in pre- and Early Shang times.
Evangelicals, the Bible, and Technology
Authors: Dyer John
Published: November 2022

This chapter introduces the key reasons why evangelicals have come to dominate the Bible software industry. Defining evangelism is a perennial challenge, and this chapter takes an integrated approach to drawing on historical, doctrinal, phenomenological, and sociological accounts. It argues that evangelicalism can be understood as both a set of doctrinal convictions and a unique orientation toward societal change generally and technological change in particular. This chapter shows that, for all the changes in evangelicalism over time, evangelicals have always placed a unique emphasis on the importance of the Bible. In addition, this chapter argues that evangelicals have a distinct approach to technological changed called Hopeful Entrepreneurial Pragmatism, showing that evangelical technologists tend to have a hopeful attitude toward technology, an entrepreneurial approach to business and ministry, and a pragmatic outlook on mission and outcomes.
Programmers and the Business of Bible Software
Authors: Dyer John
Published: November 2022

This chapter shifts from a historical approach to Bible software to an analysis of interviews with current leaders at three Bible software companies, Logos Bible Software, Bible Gateway, and YouVersion, exploring their evangelical and technological identities. This analysis shows that each company focuses on a different technology—desktop software, Bible websites, and mobile apps respectively—and has a different business model—software and content sales, advertising, and donations. And yet, for all these differences, all three companies share a common set of values, goals, and beliefs around scripture. This chapter explores the individuals behind the software as well as the product, process, and profit models that drive the companies.
Sage Writing
Authors: Russell David
Published: November 2022

This chapter addresses a tradition of thinking about the literary imagination in relation to “the positive,” in psychology and culture. In particular, it examines the ways literature cannot be recruited to positive plans for human well-being, and proposes that it is through this very resistance that literature has something to offer to the human task of “facing reality.” Drawing on the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s discussion of “scalability,” via a reading of Thomas De Quincey, the chapter explores literature’s resistance to data-driven uses. Connecting the philosopher Cora Diamond’s thinking about the “difficulty of reality” to the social criticism of John Ruskin, it suggests how certain genres of literary writing seek to reorient readers to new ways of facing reality.
Black Ecological Optimism and the Problem of Human Flourishing
Authors: Posmentier Sonya
Published: November 2022

Black literary studies raises the question: Is it possible for individuals or groups to “flourish” without collective freedom? After an introduction to Black ecological tropes of flourishing, this chapter draws attention to the late writings of feminist writer Audre Lorde, with emphasis on her accounts of surviving both breast cancer and natural disaster. By framing her story ecologically, Lorde foregrounds not a lyrical account of individual flourishing but rather the socioeconomic, political, and environmental contexts of unfreedom in and through which Black women survive. Deemphasizing the individual psyche as the site of resilience, she nonetheless portrays poetry as the site of resistance because of the access it affords to affect. Thus, Lorde’s writings on survival have further implications for redefining the “positive” in positive psychology, insofar as they direct us away from data-driven (or positivist) methods of measurement and toward feeling as epistemology.
Merely Ameliorative
Authors: Love Heather
Published: November 2022

This chapter tracks the fortunes of repair as a motive for reading in recent discussions in literary studies, considering it alongside the eudaimonic turn. In her influential account of paranoid and reparative reading practices, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests a novel object for criticism: participation in an “ecology of knowing” that aims toward the repair of the person. Addressing recent discussions about critique and postcritique as well as the mood of criticism, this chapter tracks the possibilities for such a eudaimonic program in literary criticism. In particular, it is concerned with the place of joy and pleasure in Left literary and cultural criticism—especially in the fields of queer, critical race, and disability studies. To offer a broader context for these contemporary discussions, the chapter looks to the presence of happiness in the writings of Theodor Adorno. The chapter considers the politics of pain and pleasure in the work of Sedgewick and Adorno. It draws a connection between them on the basis of their sensitivity to experience, arguing that their attempt to stay close to their objects attunes them to the affective complexities of modernity.
We Are Not Sure What Public Health Is
Authors: Stein Michael D.
Published: November 2022

Public health focuses on the causes of health. How can health be caused? Maybe a better way of saying this is by turning it around: Which life conditions and contexts (in concert with genetics and luck), when properly attended to, keep us well? Emphasis on the Us. Worldly conditions always apply to more than an individual. The public health perspective introduces life expectancy as an average. Unlike a doctor focused on the Me perspective, the public health practitioner does not look to measure the risk of any single person precisely, but only the health of a population living in a community with a clear eye on the range and full spectrum of health across community members. The richest American men live 15 years longer than the poorest men; the highest income women live 10 years longer than lowest. This inequality is stunning, profound, and disconcerting.
If Public Health Work Is Preventive, It’s Invisible and Becomes Visible Only During Crises
Authors: Stein Michael D.
Published: November 2022

Public health is continually losing out to health care in the conversation of the public square and in the court of public opinion because health care is bought and sold, accessed at the time when people need it, whereas public health concerns itself with the visible and invisible dangers in the world and how people might avoid them when they might not even know the dangers are present. Perhaps there is less commitment to prevention because people valorize risk. Perhaps prevention implies restriction—stop smoking, lose weight, wear a mask—and people take pride in defying orders. For freedom, danger must be accepted.
Public Health Is Missing Health Care’s Personal Stories
Authors: Stein Michael D.
Published: November 2022

Medical stories are easy for people to understand because they have all experienced insults to their bodies. Public health injuries—air pollution inducing lung disease, diets predisposing to obesity—are more difficult to visualize but are no less real. During July 1995, Chicago, Illinois, experienced a heat wave that killed thousands—the perfect example of a public health story of anonymized lives. Social conditions directed the deadliness of this heat wave; the victims were most often elderly, Black, poor, and isolated. A typical public health narrative is about the forces in the world that overtake Us, rather than a health care story (Me story) about how one person feels in the grip of a particular force: illness. The Chicago heat wave is a clarifying tale for those who think of the world in terms of and contingent on structure and context, and not in terms of a single person. Giving public health a story can be done. But it’s tricky and it often has a detective-tale element.
Health Indivisible
Authors: Stein Michael D.
Published: November 2022

In Part 1, explanations of health were classified into two perspectives. One focuses on the social forces that drive groups of people toward poor health (e.g., poverty, racism), a structure of overt and unspoken rules that can only be addressed through a politics that takes up the perspective of public health. A second perspective examines how individuals choose to resist these forces through their daily personal decision-making. Health can be viewed from either side of this so-called structure–agency distinction. In Part 2, it is argued that health care professionals, across thousands of private offices and clinics, need to engage with the social forces that shape health, becoming, in effect, public health practitioners. Doctors have traditionally been taught to take limited family and social histories. However, more extended patient interviews, providing a wider focus on the socioeconomic drivers of health, on the forces that produce health, can provide the perspective that lets doctors truly support health rather than just treat disease. Clinicians can see themselves throughout their careers as being part of the community-based ensemble that generates peoples’ health rather than playing a role only when patients are sick.
Establishment of Geology at the Universities and the Golden Age
Authors: Goudie Andrew S. , Brunsden Denys
Published: November 2022

In the early nineteenth century, geology became established in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Geology became more professional with the foundation of the Geological Society of London. Individuals from this period, who had a major role on the Jurassic Coast, included William and Mary Buckland, William Conybeare, and Henry De La Beche. It was also a time when the Ice Age concept developed and thus helped to explain deposits and landforms previously thought to have been the result of diluvial action.
Gifted Stratigraphers and Palaeontologists
Authors: Goudie Andrew S. , Brunsden Denys
Published: November 2022

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jurassic Coast of England attracted a number of gifted scientists, and they were often based in either Lyme Regis or Charmouth. They made very detailed and significant contributions to our understanding of the Lias and to other parts of the Jurassic. Notable figures who studied the Lias included Muriel Arber, William Dickson Lang, Leonard Spath, and Edward Day, while William Fitton, Joseph Prestwich, Osmond Fisher, Sydney Buckman, and Michael House worked on other aspects of Jurassic history. Muriel Arber also did work on the landslips and mudflows at Axmouth, Black Ven, and Stonebarrow.
The Retirement Challenge
Authors: Baily Martin Neil , Harris Benjamin H.
Published: November 2022

We need a new retirement paradigm as private pensions disappear. Families must take more responsibility for their retirement by saving consistently, working long enough to accumulate enough savings, and spending their savings at an appropriate rate in retirement. Families cannot build a secure retirement by themselves, however; they need help from government and employers. This book discusses the strengths and weaknesses of our current retirement system and suggests feasible, sensible reforms to make it much better. Policymakers must put Social Security and Medicare on a sound financial footing. They should provide incentives for all employers to set up retirement savings plans and, for workers who lack access to an employer-provided plan, create federal- or state-run plans so that all workers can save for retirement. Policymakers should reform the large tax incentives for retirement saving that mostly benefit affluent families so that they help all families. Insurance markets can help families manage the risks of uncertain lifetimes and the cost of long-term care, but they don’t work well. Neither does the market for reverse mortgages that could help families deploy the equity in their homes. Most companies have shut down their traditional pension programs, but they can contribute to 401(k)-type plans for their employees and encourage all employees to contribute to them as well. They can give employees the option to buy annuities and long-term care insurance as part of their retirement packages and negotiate group rates for these policies.
Retirement
Authors: Baily Martin Neil , Harris Benjamin H.
Published: November 2022

Broad generalizations about retirement readiness are hard to make. The affluent middle class is doing well; retirement-age families usually own their homes and have saved to support themselves as they age. Some still have pensions dating back to the old retirement regime. Poor and lower middle-class families, however, are often not doing well. Their retirements can be threatened by illness, divorce, or economic downturns. Saving for retirement is a struggle, and many such families resign themselves to living off Social Security, perhaps supplemented by some work income. Families that enjoyed stable middle-class livelihoods during their working years may face difficult choices, often tied to health and long-term care. These challenges are compounded by rising life expectancy, a positive development but one for which families must budget for more years from their savings. The current retirement landscape is not bleak for all families, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
Working Longer
Authors: Baily Martin Neil , Harris Benjamin H.
Published: November 2022

Many families can improve their standard of living in retirement if they decide to work longer. Some families have a sizable nest egg for retirement, so they can choose to retire early or keep working. Other families have had mentally or physically demanding jobs and others are forced to retire because of poor health or job loss. People should not be forced to work longer to make ends meet. Social Security retirement and disability programs should ensure that older Americans are not pushed into poverty if they cannot keep working. However, for those who can make a choice, working a few extra years pays off. If someone postpones collecting Social Security (which they can up to age 70), each year they postpone gives them 5–8 percent more on their monthly benefit for the rest of their lives. Also, working longer gives people more years in which to save and fewer years over which to spread their retirement savings.
Reverse Mortgages
Authors: Baily Martin Neil , Harris Benjamin H.
Published: November 2022

Many families have savings in financial assets but considerable wealth as home equity. They can sell the house, but then the family must find another place to live. Naturally, some retirees want to remain in their own homes and “age in place.” Reverse mortgages were created to help older people remain in their homes, using their home equity for support. With a reverse mortgage, the homeowner takes out an interest-accruing loan against the value of the house but does not make interest payments until the homeowner dies or decides to leave their home. Reverse mortgages can be an appealing product to access home equity, although the market suffers from reputational challenges and widespread design flaws. This chapter explores the reverse mortgage market, its pros and cons, and how to make it more attractive to retirees while reducing the risks of loan default.
How to Improve Retirement Accounts
Authors: Baily Martin Neil , Harris Benjamin H.
Published: November 2022

The best way to build retirement preparedness is to fix the system we have. The most important step is to ensure that more people have access to a retirement account at work. The government could mandate that all employers provide accounts, but small employers would strongly resist it. Instead, policymakers should provide tax incentives to companies to cover the cost of setting up retirement accounts. They also could create a government-run program available to everyone, and many states have begun to do so. In addition, they should reform the savings incentives for families. The annual federal tax break on retirement savings provides around $250 billion in benefits, and most of it goes to wealthy families. Policymakers should use the same money to help lower-income families build assets in retirement savings plans. This chapter looks at steps that could enhance retirement accounts.
Improving Opportunities for Older Workers
Authors: Baily Martin Neil , Harris Benjamin H.
Published: November 2022

The authors have explained the advantage of working longer—for those who can—as pensions disappear and life expectancy rises. One proposal to increase the employment of older workers is to automatically move retirement-age workers onto Medicare, thereby eliminating employer costs of providing them with health insurance and making them less expensive to employ. Policymakers could incentivize low-wage older workers to keep working by enhancing the Earned Income Tax Credit, a wage subsidy that is currently unavailable to older workers. Another important way to increase older worker employment is by strengthening anti-discrimination laws. In principle, age-related discrimination in the workplace is prohibited. But judges interpret the law in ways that largely vitiate it, creating the need for legal reform. This chapter examines proposals to encourage workers to stay on the job and give them greater work opportunities.
Our Guarantee
Authors: Glinsky Albert
Published: November 2022

Chapter 3 follows Bob at Queens College, including the launching of his first business, RAMCO, started with his Dad from their home basement. Bob’s hobbyist article—how to build your own theremin—is accepted by Radio and Television News, and offers the “model 201” theremin as a kit, or fully built. Buoyed by some sales, they develop more advanced theremins, the 305, and the 351, and put the company “on the books” as the R. A. Moog Company, a sole proprietorship. Sales are good, but they manage to run a loss. Bob’s second theremin article is accepted by Audiocraft magazine, and he and his father are contacted by Raymond Scott, the eccentric American TV bandmaster who orders their theremin but cuts it up to use in an instrument of his own invention: the Clavivox Bob meets Shirley Leigh, a student at Queens College, and they become engaged, over the objections of Bob’s mother.
Do It Yourself
Authors: Glinsky Albert
Published: November 2022

Bob launches a company newsletter, Moog Music, revealing his plans to invent some kind of electronic musical device for composers in the future. He polls readers on products they’d want now; they vote for a high-end portable amp. Moog Music also educates readers about electronic music, including two European schools of thought: musique concrète (with Pierre Schaeffer), and Elektronische Musik (with Karlheinz Stockhausen). American pioneers include Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening at Columbia University. Bob starts a factory in Trumansburg, New York. However, only the Melodia and a high-end theremin, the “Troubador,” are shipped—the amp isn’t ready. Walter Sear becomes company rep and shares a booth with Bob at the New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) conference. There, Bob meets composer Herb Deutsch and they discuss the laborious process of creating electronic music, deciding to get together so Bob can build equipment to facilitate composing. The Moog’s second daughter, Renée, is born.
A Few Thousand Screws
Authors: Glinsky Albert
Published: November 2022

To keep the lights on at R. A. Moog, Bob resorted to picking up odd projects. His sales rep, Walter Sear, brokered a gig producing “junk amps”—cheap amplifiers filled with distortion that teenagers were clamoring for. Bob also took on a project for the “New York Research Group” to design an apparatus of byzantine complexity for what appeared to be a Defense Department contractor. Sear also got Bob a gig designing custom antennas for dancers to interact with in Variations V, a John Cage piece that premiered at Lincoln Center. Bob also designed an ADSR envelope generator for Ussachevsky. None of these jobs brought in much money. Bob submitted his doctoral thesis and earned his Ph.D. In a bid to lure academics to his new equipment, Bob and Herb held a three-week workshop in Trumansburg. Shirleigh entertained the participants while juggling motherhood—a poster child for Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique.
Socket to Me, Baby!
Authors: Glinsky Albert
Published: November 2022

Chapter 15 highlights the first use of the Moog live. In 1969, New York’s Museum of Modern Art invited Bob to present a groundbreaking concert in its Sculpture Garden: synthesizers alone carrying an entire concert. The Trumansburg crew designed preset boxes (dubbed 1CAs) to help the performers, who included John McLaughlin and Hank Jones, navigate sound changes more quickly. The Garden had only one electrical outlet and the concert ended abruptly when someone stood on the socket housing, disconnecting all the gear. The Moog continued its ascent. It was called, “the biggest thing since the invention of the piano,” and was included in the Whole Earth Catalog. Bob’s Moog filter patent was approved. Paul Bley and Annette Peacock performed live with the Moog. Wendy Carlos and her Moog appeared with the St. Louis Symphony, and on the same day, the Moog was played at the disastrous Altamont Speedway concert.
Supporting the Troops in Historical Context
Authors: Millar Katharine M.
Published: November 2022

This chapter places the emergence of the troops as a distinct object of political concern in the historical context of US and UK civil-military relations. It tracks the gendered relations of the liberal military contract from the late nineteenth century through the 1990 Gulf War. US and UK civil-military relations are both characterized by movement from an initial suspicion of standing armed forces to a post–World War II veneration of military service as a key component of citizenship and masculinity. It identifies the idea of “the troops” as stemming from the disillusioning US experience of Vietnam, but it quickly came to characterize civil-military relations more broadly (including the UK involvement in the Falklands/Malvinas). By the late twentieth century, support for the troops was naturalized as an apolitical expectation of wartime citizenship. This consensus, following a brief rally round the flag period after 9/11, fractured in the war on terror.
Support and the Making of Political Community
Authors: Millar Katharine M.
Published: November 2022

This chapter plays out the implications of support as the new service for political community. It argues masculinized/ing martial solidarity (a) bounds the liberal polity, determining who is in and (b) redeems the normative status of the liberal polity in the process, recovering from the dissonance of the fracturing martial contract. The chapter then examines the implications of supporting the troops for liberal wars. The gendered, political obligation of solidarity transcends the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Support can be projected or imposed as a continuity of affinity and/or imperialism. The chapter reads transnational alliance politics among the West as expressing not only liberal but also, neo-colonial, White solidarity in the global war on terror. For people racialized as “Other,” support is expected, and required, to offset a pre-existing presumption of enmity and threat. Even actual military service, however, is not sufficient for the recognition of rights and political belonging.
Shots
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: November 2022

This part breaks Astaire’s dancing on film down to the level of the shot, identifying 932 shots in his output. Objective data, such as average shot length and the lengthiest shot in each routine, provides insight into Astaire’s practices of transferring a dance routine to the medium of film. Descriptive analysis of Astaire shots considers his use of the cutaway (shots of others watching him dance) and the insert (partial body shots of the dancers themselves). Astaire’s default “full figure” framing is described, including his use of shots that reframe the dancing body. The relationship between Astaire’s approach and Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man drawing highlights the philosophical implications of Astaire’s commitment to “full figure” framing. His approaches to shot duration and content are compared across the four periods of his career, with attention to how aesthetic principles and production conveniences played into the choices evident in his film dances.
Days, Hours, Minutes
Authors: Decker Todd
Published: November 2022

This part uses studio production files to present a granular portrait of the creation of studio musicals. Drawing mostly on assistant director reports from RKO and MGM, the days, hours, and minutes it took to make musical films are broken down. Astaire’s process of making a musical film is considered comparatively across his output and at the level of the shot (how many takes he required to get a printable take). Quantitative measures reveal Astaire’s standard practices on the set, as well numbers and films that are outliers (whether very efficient or inefficient). Studio methods for monitoring performing bodies in the musical genre, especially dancers, are also considered, with attention to how individual performers, such as Judy Garland and Ginger Rogers, asserted minimal control over the production process. The day-to-day work of filmmaking is shown in detail.
The Fasces
Authors: Brennan T. Corey
Published: November 2022

For an astounding two millennia—from the Etruscans of the seventh century bce, then through the Romans under all their forms of government, indeed down to the last Byzantine dynasty—political authorities used the device known as the “fasces” to induce respect as well as fear. This was a bundle of wooden rods and a single-bladed axe bound with leather straps—in essence, a mobile kit for punishment. In the Renaissance, some writers and artists found it irresistible to associate the fasces with an old (and unrelated) didactic tale from Aesop illustrating how sticks are stronger once bundled. And so, over the course of the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the Roman emblem came to represent not just expected concepts such as power, punishment, and justice, but now also strength, unity, and liberty against tyranny. The “Fascist” movement of Benito Mussolini, which seized power in Italy in October 1922, purported to revive the Roman emblem in its original form. But it retained aspects of the modern reimagining of the fasces, and introduced still further novelties, such as glorification of the “lictors,” the lowly attendants who carried the fasces in antiquity. Since World War II, the fasces has seen widespread but uneven eradication, in the context of a public that has grown progressively unconversant with the symbol. It is precisely the fasces’ long history and relative present-day unfamiliarity that have given an opening to right-wing extremists searching for a symbol that is potent, but not widely provocative at first glance.