The best assessment yet of the role played by the leading western central banks – the US Federal Reserve, the ECB and the Bank of England – in the run-up to the financial crisis and beyond, from two former insiders at the top level of UK policymaking.
A critical look, from a left-leaning perspective, at some of the defining intellectual fashions of the past three decades. Quiggin is a writer of great verve who marshals some powerful evidence.
A high-powered yet accessible analysis of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Fault Lines was awarded the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Rajan, a University of Chicago economist, was one of the few who warned that the crisis was coming and his book fizzes with striking and thought-provoking ideas.
The year’s most enchanting science book. Seeley, biology professor at Cornell University, distils the insights of 40 years studying and keeping bees. He focuses on the astonishing “democratic” process that takes place when a swarm of thousands of bees leaves an overcrowded hive to find a new home: how scouts evaluate potential sites and advertise their merits, how a final choice is made, and how the swarm navigates to its new nest.
A very readable guide to the recent globalisation of sport by academics who understand both US and European sports. Packed with examples, from David Beckham to Kobe Bryant, the book explores the tension between sport’s globalisation and the fact that most teams still arouse the greatest emotions in their local areas.
Definitely a great year of non-fiction books! Congratulations to all authors mentioned!
The New York Law School Institute for Information Law and Policy and the New York Law School Sports Law Society is pleased to present:
Professor Andrei Markovits
Professor Markovits is currently Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Markovits, a world-renowned scholar, will speak about his latest work entitled, Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2010).
Date: Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Time: 6:00 pm- 8:00 pm
Place: Faculty Commons, 2nd Floor, 185 W. Broadway, New York, NY 10013
Of Gaming the World, Peter J. Katzenstein, professor of International Studies at Cornell University, has said: “For those of us turning to the sports page of our daily paper first, here is the book we have been waiting for. Gaming the World offers an up-to-date analysis of the capitalist dreamscape of an important leisure industry. Transformed by globalization, exposed to local and national backlash, marked by American and European exceptionalisms, and rife with symbolic politics, Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann argue, we are what we play–contaminated cosmopolitans in a global civilization still tethered to our local and national roots. What fun!”
In a recent review in the Times Higher Education, John Harris wrote: “This book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning study of sport in a global perspective. . . . Markovits and Rensmann’s erudite analysis presents many of the key issues and offers interesting points to consider as the sports world continues to change at a remarkable pace.”
Date:
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Time:
7:00 PM.
Location:
Nicola’s Books
2513 Jackson Ave
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48103-3818
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University is hosting a lecture with Andrei Markovits on the subject of his new PUP book. Hope you can join him for an exciting discussion of how global sports and politics co-mingle.
“Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture”
Date: Friday, September 24, 2010
Time: 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM
Location: Goldman Room, Busch Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge MA
For more information about this event, please contact Trisha Craig, pcraig@fas.harvard.edu.
In a recent review in the Times Higher Education, John Harris wrote: “This book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning study of sport in a global perspective. . . . Markovits and Rensmann’s erudite analysis presents many of the key issues and offers interesting points to consider as the sports world continues to change at a remarkable pace.”
Date:
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Time:
7:00 PM.
Location:
Nicola’s Books
2513 Jackson Ave
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48103-3818
Earlier this week, we posted Andrei Markovits’s reading list and said that, like us, he’s probably deeply depressed that the World Cup has ended. Well, we now have confirmation – Andrei is indeed heartbroken:
“you were SPOT ON with your assessment that I am devastated with the end of the World Cup. I am ambling about aimlessly and helplessly and totally disoriented.”
Unfortunately, Andrei is suffering from a classic case of World Cup withdrawal. Don’t worry though; he will be back on his feet in no time:
“THANK GOD for MLB’s ALL STAR Game, the resumption of the baseball season tonight, the Tour de France and The (British) Open Championship.”
So fear not, and take comfort in knowing that you will soon return to normal.
Try coping by reading one of Andrei’s books:
And remember, if Andrei can get through it, you can too!
In this podcast from the University of Michigan, Andrei Markovits discusses how international sports heroes “play an inordinate role in actually changing society,” and how soccer has been Olympianized by The World Cup which has increased interest here in the U.S. These themes are further developed in his new book, co-authored with Lars Rensmann, Gaming the World.
We’re launching our first book giveaway on Facebook. Follow us on Facebook and automatically be entered in our random drawing on Friday to win a copy of:
Gaming the World:
How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture
Andrei S. Markovits & Lars Rensmann
Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.
Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This new book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.
Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world.
Andrei Markovits tackles a fascinating question over at The Huffington Post — why have sports become the last accepted bastion of “separate, but equal”? Football, baseball, and basketball — prominent sports are a boys only club for the most part, and have been allowed to continue this way in spite of demands for equality in virtually ever other arena. Markovits writes:
Short of certain religions (an arena in which, too, the struggle for equality has had some remarkable successes), one would be hard put to point to any institution of such importance in our society in which such “sexual apartheid” (to use Paul Hoch’s apt terminology though I prefer “gender apartheid”) is not only tolerated but actively enforced, perhaps even feted as progress.
Why is this and are there solutions? Markovits continues:
If we continue to define “the best”, which is such an integral part of any sport, by our current criteria, then this separate but equal world will never change. But if we construct alternate logics to what constitutes “the best” – include metrics of cooperation and style, for example, in computing winners and losers, or create truly gender-integrated teams in which the women’s output would be weighted more heavily (e.g. assign five points to baskets scored by female players as opposed to the two by males) thereby creating real incentives to have the women be welcomed as positive additions to these teams, as has been the case in the aforementioned intramural contests — then we might actually arrive at a truly integrated sports world which would thus be congruent with virtually all important public institutions of our contemporary democratic world.
Featuring commentary and interviews from Princeton University Press authors, the PUP Blog is a highly respected, timely and indispensable source for learning, understanding and reflection.
I've now read the full Cato Journal immigration issue cover-to-cover. Leaving aside my lead article, here are my brief reactions:1. Gordon Hanson, "Immigration and Economic Growth." Pretty good, especially on the interaction between high-skilled native labor and low-skilled immigrant labor:One contribution of low-skilled immigrants is to mak […]
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According to this amusing diagram in Cracked, facial tattoos mean "I will never have a job that pays taxes." Many economists would presumably insist, "It's not causal. The kind of people who tattoo their faces just have low productivity." I admit that selection is part of reason why people with face tattoos rarely make the big buc […]
