Earning a higher salary rarely solves financial stress; in fact, it usually exacerbates it. As our income grows, so do our tastes, leading to an invisible phenomenon known as lifestyle creep. We upgrade our cars, our homes, and our wardrobes, entirely trapping ourselves in a high-stress cycle where we must work relentlessly just to maintain an inflated baseline of consumption. Intentional Wealth provides a roadmap for escaping this exhausting financial treadmill. True wealth is not measure...

East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, is an edited collection of thirty-one essays that trace the experience of a California community over three centuries, from eighteenth-century Spanish colonization to twenty-first century globalization. Employing traditional historical scholarship, oral history, creative nonfiction and original art, the book provides a radical new history of El Monte and South El Monte, showing how interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship ca...

Just when something feels played out, a fresh viewpoint can revitalize it. That's the power of being a writer. You get to show people a way of perceiving the world they had never considered before. FICTION VORTEX: Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS’s form but most of i...

How do you encompass all the worlds of the imagination? Within fantasy’s scope lies every possible impossibility, from dragons to spirits, from magic to gods, and from the unliving to the undying. In Fearsome Journeys, master anthologist Jonathan Strahan sets out on a quest to find the very limits of the unlimited, collecting twelve brand new stories by some of the most popular and exciting names in epic fantasy from around the world.With original fiction from Scot...

The Taiwan Strait conflict threatens to shatter the global economy and draw the world into war. What makes this increasingly heated perpetual standoff so uniquely intractable?Forging Enmity in the Taiwan Strait explains the conflict as an existential collision between political communities expressing collective identities that are bedrock mutually exclusive. For the Chinese Community Party, Taiwan’s autonomy sabotages the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.” For the...

From the Mexican American War and through the Civil War Era, Mexican and US social hierarchies collided in Southern California, transforming the character of Los Angeles from Mexican-Californian to "American." Influencing this transition in unexpected ways were three men of color: a Californio general turned legislator; a formerly enslaved barber; and a Mexico City-born politician and historian. In Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles...

The coastal ocean comprises the semi-enclosed seas on the continental shelf, including estuaries and extending to the shelf break. This region is the focus of many serious concerns, including coastal inundation by tides, storm surges or sea level change; fisheries and aquaculture management; water quality; harmful algal blooms; planning of facilities (such as power stations); port development and maintenance; and oil spills. This book addresses modeling and simulation of the transport, evo...

China's Futures cuts through the sometimes confounding and unfounded speculation of international pundits and commentators to provide readers with an important yet overlooked set of complex views concerning China's future: views originating within China itself. Daniel Lynch seeks to answer the simple but rarely asked question: how do China's own leaders and other elite figures assess their country's future?Many Western social scientists, business leaders, journalists, tech...

A Critical Companion to David Lynch builds on the vast debate of one of the most discussed and researched directors of the present era, with commercial and critical success across multiple mediums and genres. This edited volume provides a wide-ranging exploration of Lynch’s films, practices, and collaborations, with nineteen original chapters examining themes including narrativity, aesthetics, artistry, sound, experimentation, metafiction, and patriarchy from the disciplinary pers...

“That’s true according to the law of the country,” answered the king.The wicked men then said, “We saw Daniel in his room, and there he knelt down and prayed to God three times. He did this for three days in a row.”When Darius heard this he was disappointed that he had signed such a cruel law because Daniel was a good man and president. He couldn’t sleep that night, and in the morning the wicked governors and presidents came to him, and they reminded him of the new rule, an...

How globalized information networks can be used for strategic advantageUntil recently, globalization was viewed, on balance, as an inherently good thing that would benefit people and societies nearly everywhere. Now there is growing concern that some countries will use their position in globalized networks to gain undue influence over other societies through their dominance of information and financial networks, a concept known as weaponized interdependence....

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.Nothing Absolute...