Escaping the Iron Cage_ by Pattrick B. Sullivan challenges the way we think about work, leadership, and organizational culture. In a world where systems often matter more than people, this book reveals how lack of trust, poor communication, and disconnected teams quietly undermine success. Drawing on decades of real-world experience, Sullivan uncovers the root causes of workplace dysfunction and explains why the same problems continue to repeat across organizations.Rather than offe...

A funny, sharp, and slightly unhinged field guide to the agentic workplace.AI agents are not just chatbots. The moment you give a model permissions, you give it authority. And once authority shows up, your organization does what it always does. It measures everything that moves, logs every breath, builds dashboards like emotional support animals, and starts managing humans by whatever the dashboard can count.Meet Team Space Otter, the builders and shippers. Team Goth Koala,...

Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren’t all heroes.Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He’s a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.That’s what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything—or anyone—could be the fuse to ignite them: a recently re...

Since the 1950s, television flooded the American soundscape with not just pictures but sounds, a constant aural stream infiltrating domestic life. In Stay Tuned, Patrick Sullivan treats network-era television sound not as background noise or auxiliary signal but as a formative texture of aesthetic life in postwar America. He theorizes how television’s sonic forms—asynchronous audiovisuals, noises, affective rhythms, what he collectively terms “network aurality”—trouble traditional...

So how do we move the future from the distant horizon to the present day? We need Intellectual Anarchy.The accelerating challenges facing our planet—such as climate change, food scarcity, sustainable energy, overpopulation, nuclear proliferation, income inequality, and rising healthcare costs—are solvable. The question is not if, but when.All these challenges directly impact our lives and our unwritten future. They have enormous economic consequences for humans and society....

Why and how the French made the balloon into one of the quintessential symbols of late nineteenth-century modernity, and how the balloon’s reinvention shaped the airplane’s assimilation in the early years of aviation.On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinge...

Reimagining elementary mathematics pedagogy using a three-step process—See It, Say It, Symbolize It—author Patrick L. Sullivan provides a guide for developing a dynamic and flexible understanding of numbers and operations. By helping students develop a language that is consistent across concepts and connecting it to what is seen and symbolized, teachers empower their students to engage in reasoning they will utilize throughout their lives.This book will help K–5 educators:

This book assesses the oversight regime in Afghanistan to identify and characterize the oversight failures, and then links them to specific negative strategic outcomes. Although there are high-quality analyses available about what went wrong in Afghanistan and why, few of them are grounded in scholarly research that uses empirical methods. This book fills that epistemological gap as well as provides a unique contribution to the body of literature, which does not contain any comprehensive s...

The contemporary geopolitical order is marked by profound instability: international law appears fractured and largely ineffective, might is often right as power prevails over principle. This book identifies one fundamental reason for the apparent gangsterish anarchy— lack of enforcement power for international institutions and the primary premise of international law being that of an effectively absolute national sovereignty. Drawing on the political philosophies of Hobbes and Kant this b...

In May 1915, the RMS Lusitania, then the world's fastest liner, departed from New York. Seven days later she was torpedoed off the Irish coast with the loss of 1,198 lives. Suspected by the Germans of carrying clandestine munitions to Britain, the great ship steamed into a fatal encounter with the German submarine U-20. One of the largest naval disasters in history, it was a factor in bringing America into the First World War. Patrick O'Sullivan presents the complete story of the Lusitania...

Adapted from the 55th Annual Walter Prescott Webb Lecture Series held in 2021, Flight Culture and the Human Experience sheds new light on the myriad ways aviation has transformed ideas, cultures, and societies across time and around the globe. In bringing together seven established and emerging scholars to explore little known chapters in the history of aviation, this collection transports readers back to “a time when flight was new, while opening analytical paths for interpreting...

This book takes a fresh look at an age-old controversy in ethics and political economy that stretches right back to Aristotle: the morality and the economics of debt financing, or the charging of interest on loans. It endeavours to show the immense relevance of those ancient debates in the contemporary economy.Outside of countries which practise Islam and Islamic finance, the charging of interest is taken completely for granted today and little or no thought is devoted to its moral...