In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need f...

Film came to the territory that eventually became Israel not long after the medium was born. Casting a Giant Shadow is a collection of articles that embraces the notion of transnationalism to consider the limits of what is "Israeli" within Israeli cinema.As the State of Israel developed, so did its film industries. Moving beyond the early films of the Yishuv, which focused on the creation of national identity, the industry and its transnational ties became more important a...

Wall Street and Silicon Valley – the two worlds this book examines – promote the illusion that scarcity can and should be eliminated in the age of seamless “flow.” Instead, Appadurai and Alexander propose a theory of habitual and strategic failure by exploring debt, crisis, digital divides, and (dis)connectivity. Moving between the planned obsolescence and deliberate precariousness of digital technologies and the “too big to fail” logic of the Great Recession, they argue that the sense of ...

If the Arab uprisings initially heralded the end of tyrannies and a move toward liberal democratic governments, their defeat not only marked a reversal but was of a piece with emerging forms of authoritarianism worldwide. In Authoritarian Apprehensions, Lisa Wedeen draws on her decades-long engagement with Syria to offer an erudite and compassionate analysis of this extraordinary rush of events—the revolutionary exhilaration of the initial days of unrest and then the devastating v...

Hamid Naficy is one of the world's leading authorities on Iranian film, and A Social History of Iranian Cinema is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran's peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of wh...

Hamid Naficy is one of the world’s leading authorities on Iranian film, and A Social History of Iranian Cinema is his magnum opus. Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran’s peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of wh...

Finally: an evidence-based, reassuring guide to what to do about kids and screens, from video games to social media.Today's babies often make their debut on social media with the very first sonogram. They begin interacting with screens at around four months old. But is this good news or bad news? A wonderful opportunity to connect around the world? Or the first step in creating a generation of addled screen zombies?Many have been quick to declare this the d...

The Future of Palestine: How Discrimination Hinders Change was inspired by the shocking “honor killing” of the author’s classmate and friend, Israa Ghrayeb. Her alleged crime? The simple act of going out, in broad daylight, with her fiancé and his sister—an act Ghrayeb’s cousin maintained was unacceptable in a conservative society. While Ghrayeb’s killers may be free, their manner of thinking is anything but.In The Future of Palestine, author Tamar Haddad seeks to...

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult an...

A Winner of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa 2023 Bernard Lewis PrizeLandes, a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through the first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misi...

The essays in this volume, by leading scholars from within and outside Israel, shed new light on the Israeli historians' controversy of the creation of the State of Israel, the 1948 War and its aftermath, Israel's attitude towards Holocaust survivors, the "melting pot" absorption policy and similar subjects. The attack on Zionist historiography, which initially came from what is dubbed the "post-Zionist" radical left, has recently broadened to include a critique from the right. These essay...

"A marvelous job of exploring first hand the implications of storing our entire lives digitally."-Guy L. Tribble, Apple, Inc.Tech luminary, Gordon Bell, and Jim Gemmell unveil a guide to the next digital revolution. Our daily life started becoming digital a decade ago. Now much of what we do is digitally recorded and accessible. This trend won't stop. And the benefits are astonishing.Based on their own research Bell and Gemmell explain the ever- incr...