The Science Of Lost Futures

The Science of Lost Futures is a prize-winning collection full of quirky humor and intelligent absurdity. Ryan Habermeyer is a yarn spinner of the first order. Drawing on urban legends, internet hoaxes, and ancient medical folklore, these stories go beyond science fiction and magical realism to create a captivating collection of fabulist stories that revel in the alien and the absurd.

In Search of Lost Futures asks how imaginations might be activated through practices of autoethnography, multimodality, and deep interdisciplinarity—each of which has the power to break down methodological silos, cultivate novel research sensibilities, and inspire researchers to question what is known about ethnographic process, representation, reflexivity, audience, and intervention within and beyond the academy. By blurring the boundaries between the past, present, and future; between absence and presence; between the possible and the impossible; and between fantasy and reality, In Search of Lost Futures pushes the boundaries of ethnographic engagement. It reveals how researchers on the cutting edge of the discipline are studying absence and grief and employing street performance, museum exhibit, anticipation, or simulated reality to research and intervene in the possible, the impossible, and the uncertain.

Depict the plight of children around the world, including victims of war, disease, and abuse.

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

A collection of short fiction that explores a range of the human experience in a science fiction world.

It's been a year since Elena Martinez and her boyfriend Adam first got involved with Aether Corporation, and they’re trying to move on with their lives. But when Adam goes missing, Elena realizes that he’s done the unthinkable: he went to Aether for help developing his cure for cancer. Adam betrayed her trust and has traveled into the future, but he didn’t come back when he was supposed to. Desperate to find him, Elena decides to risk future shock, and time travels one more time. This future is nothing like they’ve seen before. Someone has weaponized Adam’s cure and created a dangerous pandemic, leading to the destruction of civilization. If Elena can’t find Adam and stop this, everyone is at risk. And someone will do anything to keep her from succeeding.

A rollicking exploration of the history and future of our favorite foods When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. Whether it’s chasing down the luscious butter of local Icelandic cattle or looking at the impacts of modern industrialized agriculture on the range of food varieties we can put in our shopping carts, Newman’s bright, intelligent gaze finds insight and humor at every turn. Bracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore enlists her ecologist friend and fellow cook, Dan, in a series of “extinction dinners” designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, Lost Feast makes a critical contribution to our understanding of food security today. You will never look at what’s on your plate in quite the same way again.

'A Japan that never was, a future lost, ghosts that are not dead ... not even a partial list of ingredients can do justice to this wonderful cake of a book ... A time-defying thriller' ROBIN HOBB Strange things are happening in Tokyo. As war with Russia looms, the city is plagued by strange electricity storms, while the staff at the British Legation have gone on strike, claiming that the building is haunted. Thaniel Steepleton is sent over from London to act as interpreter, bringing with him his partner, Keita Mori the watchmaker, their adopted daughter, Six, and Mori's clockwork octopus, Katsu. Thaniel is dazzled by life in Tokyo, but he feels increasingly out of his depth – especially when he meets Takiko Pepperharrow, and learns of her connection to Mori. But then Mori disappears, and Thaniel and Takiko's paths diverge as they desperately try to find him. As their searches lead them to snow-steeped prisons and mountainside shrines, Thaniel is faced with the terrifying revelation that Mori's powers are no longer enough to save them – and that the watchmaker's time may have run out. Natasha Pulley's extraordinary new novel, The Kingdoms, will be available in Spring 2021.

Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction A poignant tale about the enduring friendship between two men under the shadow of the Second World War. Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav’s family, tracing the roots of his mother’s anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, The Gustav Sonata explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and regained over a lifetime. It is a powerful and deeply moving addition to the beloved oeuvre of one of our greatest contemporary novelists.