Showing titles in Aesthetics

Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence.

Among the many things expectant parents are told to buy, none is a more visible symbol of status and parenting philosophy than a stroller. Although its association with wealth dates back to the invention of the first pram in the 1700s, in recent decades, four-figure strollers have become not just status symbols but cultural identifiers.

Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren’t there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread—sometimes it’s tied into a noose—that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism.

"Es geht zu Ende mit der alten Wahrheit." Die alte Wahrheit, das sind laut Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) die Götzen ihrer Zeit, die es quasi mit dem Hammer zu zerschlagen gilt. Im letzten Jahr seines Schaffens (1888) beschritt Nietzsche damit den Weg der "Umwertung aller Werte" weiter - bevor ihn die Geisteskrankheit ereilte. Sein ungeduldiger Tonfall lässt vermuten, dass Nietzsche ahnte, was ihm bevorstand...

Why Did That Happen? Aristotle Has Four Answers and None of Them Are Helpful is your brutally sarcastic, surprisingly educational crash course in Aristotelian philosophy—specifically his theory of causality, aka why things happen according to a man who thought everything, including acorns and chairs, had a spiritual destiny.

The mall near Mat thew Newton’s childhood home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was one of the state’s first enclosed shopping malls. Like all malls in their heyday, this one was a climate-controlled pleasuredome where strangers converged. It boasted waterfalls, fish ponds, an indoor ice skating rink larger than Rockefeller Center’s, and a monolithic clock tower illuminated year-round beneath a canopy of interconnected skylights. It also became the backdrop for filmmaker George A. Romero’s zombie opus Dawn of the Dead.

Desde o garbo e a elegância nos primeiros anos da República até a atual banalização das cirurgias plásticas, História da beleza no Brasil trata das transformações ligadas aos padrões estéticos e aos cuidados com o corpo, mas também do martírio causado pela feiura e da tumultuada luta para driblar o envelhecimento, a solidão e o fracasso.

In den letzten Jahren hat sich Steampunk als ein faszinierendes und vielseitiges Genre etabliert, das sowohl in der Literatur als auch in anderen Kunstformen eine bedeutende Rolle spielt.

What happens when we die? Life begins with an orgasm, can this be topped at the end? The greatest moment of the author's life was watching his mother-in-law die. At this moment, observing her in a state of ecstasy, he came to understand death maybe is not the end. This began his years of work as a hospice volunteer and a student of the sometimes supernatural dying process.

よりよい“世界制作”のために、私たちの家を考えよう――。哲学の一分野である美学の中でも、とりわけ新しい学問領域「日常美学」初の入門書。

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.