Versace posed and provoked the basic issues of fashion's role. Versace tantalized us with vulgarity. In this, he adapted a strategy from the fine arts in the twentieth century, including elements of the banal and coarse in his sensibility. The collage, smarmy joke, offensive imagery, and ready-made object pertinent in the juggernaut of modern art are evidence of an attempt to be vulgar. Versace…
Plastic surgery had its beginning nearly 3000 years ago, when Sushruta, an Indian surgeon, reconstructed the nose by transferring a flap of cheek and then forehead skin. It is a modern field, stimulated by the challenging reconstructive problems of the unfortunate victims of the World Wars. The advent of the operating microscope has thrust the plastic surgeon of today into the forefront of adva…
At the waning of this century, we take the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Christian Dior's New Look to review the magnificent work he created in a little more than one decade at the century's heart. Few occasions in fashion history are as precise, and few are as worthy of consideration and celebration. It is difficult to analyze Dior today: the intervening four decades have irrevocabl…
This open access book examines the chronic underperformance of economies with respect to inclusion, sustainability and resilience. It finds that the standard liberal economic growth and development model has evolved over the past century in a fundamentally unbalanced manner that underemphasizes the crucial role of institutions – legal norms, policy incentives and public administrative capacit…
Known as the father of modern electricity, Nikola Tesla’s work transformed the world. Devoted to discovery, the scientist and engineer registered more than 700 patents in his lifetime, from X-ray to radar, to the Tesla Coil, radio, and remote control. This illustrated biography follows the development of Tesla’s key theories and inventions, shining a light on an eccentric man who, ultimatel…
Perhaps the best way to approach this volume on Buddhist statecraft is with the following observation in mind: the proper functioning of the state is a Buddhist concern. Throughout the history of the tradition, Buddhist have engaged questions of statecraft in their creation and propagation of texts, doctrines, rituals, institutions, and visual cultures. Political actors have, in turn, employed …
For millennia, one of the most consistent characteristics of Hindu traditions has been variation. Scholarly work on contemporary Hinduism and its premodern antecedents ably captures this complexity, paying attention to a wide spectrum of ideologies, practices, and positions of authority. Studies of religion in ancient India stress doctrinal variation in the period, when ideas about pe…
Poems and poets : people greet them with scorn andpoke fun at them. Why is that? Because people take the realm of poetry to be the depic-tion of simple sensual beauty, self-complacent emotionalpain and dark melancholy—things not real mirrored in mor-bid sensibilities. If poetry required only a unique sensitivityand dreamy beauty, then hysterics and the mentally il…
The idea that we learn by interacting with our environment is probably the first to occur to us when we think about the nature of learning. When an infant plays, waves its arms, or looks about, it has no explicit teacher, but it does have a direct sensorimotor connection to its environment. Exercising this connection produces a wealth of information about cause and effect, about the consequence…
It is common to find students new to psychology who believe the study of psychological disorders is psychology. These students are often disappointed to find out that it is only a small piece of what psychologists study and that they usually have to wait until the very end of the class to begin studying it. Moreover, once they get to this unit, students bring with them preconceived notions rega…