The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades-and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths. Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding-the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions-We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. "One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change," Lepore writes. "Another was to allow for change without violence." Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat. Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of "originalism," Lepore contends in this "gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past" that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process. Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore "has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union." At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us-and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole-and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called "artificial intelligence." They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian's riveting account, we meet the alignment problem's "first-responders," and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they-and we-succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity's biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture-and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.

Diamantscheibe für den Einsatz in allgemeine Baumaterialien. Anwendung: Allgemeine Baumaterialien wie Ziegel, Pflastersteine, etc. Merkmale Norton Clipper bietet eine große Auswahl an sicheren und leistungsfähigen Diamantscheiben. Standard Universal Diamantscheiben sind ein oSa-zertifiziertes Qualitätswerkzeug für Nass- und Trockenschnitt mit gutem Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis.

Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade and progressive projects on matters ranging from women's rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The "Spanish flu" heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalisation forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi's India to America's New Deal and Hitler's Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism and violent outbursts of hatred of the "other" became the norm-coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War.Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced Hardbacking and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra's unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalisation. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today's extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present.

Mama's Last Hug is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it-from dogs "adopting" the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones-show that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, fear, shame, guilt, joy, disgust, and empathy. Frans de Waal opens our hearts and minds to the many ways in which humans and other animals are connected.

Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk-the early decades of the twenty-first century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history. But it is not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What are these revolutions, and how can they help us to understand our fraught world? In this major work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world. Three such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world-and created politics as we know it today. Next, the French Revolution, an explosive era that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us today. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Great Britain and the US to global dominance and created the modern world. Alongside these paradigm-shifting historical events, Zakaria probes four present-day revolutions: globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. For all their benefits, the globalization and technology revolutions have produced profound disruptions and pervasive anxiety and our identity. And increasingly, identity is the battlefield on which the twenty-first century's polarized politics are fought. All this is set against a geopolitical revolution as great as the one that catapulted the United States to world power in the late nineteenth century. Now we are entering a world in which the US is no longer the dominant power. As we find ourselves at the nexus of four seismic revolutions, we can easily imagine a dark future. But Zakaria proves that pessimism is premature. If we act wisely, the liberal international order can be revived and populism relegated to the ash heap of history. As few public intellectuals can, Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to once again reframe and illuminate our turbulent present. His bold, compelling arguments make this book essential reading in our age of revolutions.

Praise for the #1 New York Times best-selling Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: "This book will keep you fascinated with succinct and dynamic explanations of a wide variety of astronomical topics. A winner that every astronomy enthusiast should have on the bookshelf!" - David J. Eicher, Astronomy "Grappling with the scope of the universe...is no simple endeavor, but in this tidy overview, [Tyson] succeeds with seeming effortlessness." - John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle "Tyson's insights are valuable for any leader, teacher, scientist or educator." - Carmine Gallo, Forbes "A great gift for the scientifically inclined (but busy)." - Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune "Lovely book. Last chapter worthy of Carl Sagan himself." - Richard Dawkins

Segmentbreite: 1,6 mm | Außendurchmesser: 125 mm | Bohrungsdurchmesser: 22,23 mm | Segmenthöhe: 7 mm | Merkmale: Diamantscheibe Standard Ceramic ~ Diamantscheibe für Winkelschleifer und Fliesenschneidmaschinen ~ Sauberer Trocken- und Nassschnitt ~ Gesintert, geschlossener Schneidrand ~ Für keramische Produkte, glasierte Fliesen usw.

Praise for Serhii Plokhy Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters "Frightening.... With catastrophic climate change bearing down on us, nuclear power has been promoted by some as an obvious solution, but this sobering history urges us to look hard at that bargain for what it is." -Jennifer Szalai, New York Times "[An] enthralling study of the atomic age and its perils.... [A] meticulously researched history... [and] also a timely read." -Lawrence Freedman, Financial Times Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis "Superb.... [E]ngrossing and terrifying, surely one of the most important books ever written about the Cuban Missile Crisis and 20th-century international relations." -James Rosen, Wall Street Journal "Definitive.... With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." -Economist The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine "Readers can find no better place to turn.... Plokhy navigates the subject with grace and aplomb." -Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs "In his elegant and careful exposition of Ukraine's past, Mr. Plokhy has also provided some signposts to the future." -Economist

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is an important and unforgettable modern classic: "The struggle of the individual to fit into a normalizing society remains just as relevant today as it was at the time of writing." (The Japan Times)

This Norton Critical Edition includes: . Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's poetic translation of the great Anglo-Saxon epic-winner of the Whitbread Prize-along with his translator's introduction. . Detailed explanatory annotations and an introduction to Old English language and prosody by Daniel Donoghue. . More than two dozen visuals, including, new to the Second Edition, a fine selection of objects from the Staffordshire Hoard. . A rich array of Anglo-Saxon and early northern civilisation materials, providing student readers with Beowulf's cultural and historical context. . Nine critical interpretations, three of them new to the Second Edition. . A glossary of personal names and a selected bibliography.

In this gloriously over-the-top tale, Aoyama, a widower who has lived alone with his son ever since his wife died seven years before, finally decides it is time to remarry. Since Aoyama is a bit rusty when it comes to dating, a filmmaker friend proposes that, in order to attract the perfect wife, they do a casting call for a movie they don't intend to produce. As the résumés pile up, only one of the applicants catches Aoyama's attention-Yamasaki Asami-a striking young former ballerina with a mysterious past. Blinded by his instant and total infatuation, Aoyama is too late in discovering that she is a far cry from the innocent young woman he imagines her to be. The novel's fast-paced, thriller conclusion doesn't spare the reader as Yamasaki takes off her angelic mask and reveals what lies beneath.

Knitting, sewing, embroidery, quilting-throughout history, these and other forms of textile work have often been dismissed as merely "women's work" and attached to ideas of domesticity and obedience. Yet, as psychologist and avid knitter Nicole Nehrig wonderfully explores in this captivating book, textile work has often been a way for women to exercise power. When their voices were silenced and other avenues were closed off to them, women used the tools they had-often a needle and thread-to seek freedom within the restrictive societies they lived in. Spanning continents and centuries, With Her Own Hands brings together remarkable stories of women who have used textiles as a means of liberation, from an eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls math and geography to the Quechua weavers working to preserve and revive Incan traditions today, and from the Miao women of southern China who, in the absence of a written language, pass down their histories in elaborate "story cloths" to a midcentury British women's postal art exchange. Textiles have been a way for women to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process traumas, and convey powerful messages of self-expression and political protest. Heartfelt and deeply moving, With Her Own Hands is a celebration of women who have woven their own stories-and a testament to their resilience.

Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk-the early decades of the twenty-first century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history. But it is not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What are these revolutions, and how can they help us to understand our fraught world? In this major work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world. Three such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world-and created politics as we know it today. Next, the French Revolution, an explosive era that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us today. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Great Britain and the US to global dominance and created the modern world. Alongside these paradigm-shifting historical events, Zakaria probes four present-day revolutions: globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. For all their benefits, the globalization and technology revolutions have produced profound disruptions and pervasive anxiety and our identity. And increasingly, identity is the battlefield on which the twenty-first century's polarized politics are fought. All this is set against a geopolitical revolution as great as the one that catapulted the United States to world power in the late nineteenth century. Now we are entering a world in which the US is no longer the dominant power. As we find ourselves at the nexus of four seismic revolutions, we can easily imagine a dark future. But Zakaria proves that pessimism is premature. If we act wisely, the liberal international order can be revived and populism relegated to the ash heap of history. As few public intellectuals can, Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to once again reframe and illuminate our turbulent present. His bold, compelling arguments make this book essential reading in our age of revolutions.

A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just sent his publisher a terrible manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Shortly afterward, while moping around a park in suburban Tokyo, he spots someone drowning in a nearby aqueduct. He doesn't want to become a witness to a suicide and eventually decides to flee the park. But as he is leaving, he trips over the boy who had been drowning, and the two begin an unlikely conversation that turns into an intellectual spat. Hoping to ingratiate himself with the boy-a high-school dropout-Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy's stead that very night as the live narrator of a film screening... So begins the madcap adventure of The Beggar Student, where there is glamor in destitution, and intellectual one-upmanship reveals glimmers of truth. Replete with settings incorporated into the popular anime Bungo Stray Dogs and with echoes of No Longer Human, this biting novella captures the infamous Japanese writer at his mordant best.

Today's conversations about sex often focus on consent-who has given it, when one has it and how to get it. However, good, fulfilling sex requires more than securing a "yes" from a partner. It requires a variety of kinds of communication, as well as social circumstances that support sexual agency and pleasure. In Sex Beyond "Yes", Quill R. Kukla explores what sexual agency is and how it can be enabled or hindered. Kukla reimagines pleasurable, ethical sex beyond the constraints of commodification, patriarchal and heterocentric social scripts, ableism, and puritanical and stigmatising attitudes toward sex. This book addresses the complexities of desire and the importance of creating an environment that prioritises respect, communication and joy. Centring pleasure and agency, it encourages conversations and social changes that can make good sex accessible to all.

This authorized edition of DIE VERWANDLUNG by Franz Kafka was originally published by Schocken Books Inc. in Volume I of the Gesammelte Wenke "Erzahlungen und Kleine Prosa," Berlin, 1935; New York, 1946. It appears here with the publisher's permission. This edition is in German with editorial matter in English.

The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades-and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths. Published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding-the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions-We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. "One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change," Lepore writes. "Another was to allow for change without violence." Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat. Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of "originalism," Lepore contends in this "gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past" that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process. Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore "has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union." At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers.

Segmentbreite: 1,9 mm | Außendurchmesser: 115 mm | Bohrungsdurchmesser: 22,23 mm | Segmenthöhe: 10 mm | Merkmale: Diamantscheibe Standard Universal ~ Qualitätswerkzeug für allgemeine Schneidarbeiten ~ Gesintert ~ Schnittig und mit guter Standzeit ~ Weit verzahnt ~ Trocken- oder Nassschnitt ~ Für Beton, bewehrten Beton, Betonrohre, Kalksandstein, Lehmblöcke, Ziegelsteine, Dachziegel