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\"\"The deepest economic crisis in eighty years prompted a shallow revival of Marxism,\" writes Benjamin Kunkel of the 2008 recession--and the shallowness was undoubtedly a result of the complex, sometimes difficult nature of contemporary Marxist thought. Enter Kunkel's Utopia or Bust, which leads the uninitiated reader through the biggest names in critical political theory today. Written with the wit and verve of a novelist, Utopia or Bust engages with the revolutionary philosophies of Slavoj éZiézek, the economic analyses of David Graeber and David Harvey, and the cultural diagnoses of Fredric Jameson. Discussing the crisis of capitalism alongside the idea of full employment and the right to work, Utopia or Bust is not only a tour through the world of Marxist thought, but also an examination of the state of Western society today\"-- Provided by publisher.

Background In many species males face a higher predation risk than females because males display elaborate traits that evolved under sexual selection, which may attract not only females but also predators. Females are, therefore, predicted to avoid such conspicuous males under predation risk. The present study was designed to investigate predator-induced changes of female mating preferences in Atlantic mollies ( Poecilia mexicana ). Males of this species show a pronounced polymorphism in body size and coloration, and females prefer large, colorful males in the absence of predators. Results In dichotomous choice tests predator-naïve (lab-reared) females altered their initial preference for larger males in the presence of the cichlid Cichlasoma salvini , a natural predator of P. mexicana , and preferred small males instead. This effect was considerably weaker when females were confronted visually with the non-piscivorous cichlid Vieja bifasciata or the introduced non-piscivorous Nile tilapia ( Oreochromis niloticus ). In contrast, predator experienced (wild-caught) females did not respond to the same extent to the presence of a predator, most likely due to a learned ability to evaluate their predators' motivation to prey. Conclusions Our study highlights that ( a ) predatory fish can have a profound influence on the expression of mating preferences of their prey (thus potentially affecting the strength of sexual selection), and females may alter their mate choice behavior strategically to reduce their own exposure to predators. ( b ) Prey species can evolve visual predator recognition mechanisms and alter their mate choice only when a natural predator is present. ( c ) Finally, experiential effects can play an important role, and prey species may learn to evaluate the motivational state of their predators.

El libro Manifiesto socialista, de Bhaskar Sunkara, se propone una lectura de las experiencias socialistas, desde la socialdemocracia sueca hasta la revolución soviética, con un objetivo programático: fortalecer la corriente socialista democrática en Estados Unidos e incidir en las nuevas generaciones. Pero ¿hasta qué punto este proyecto puede contribuir al nacimiento de una sociedad poscapitalista?

Published a year after the Cuban missile crisis, \"Cat's Cradle\" is a classic of Cold War science fiction. Its hallucinatory quality made Kurt Vonnegut a hero to hippies and peaceniks. Re-assesses the novel, s it is re-issued as a Penguin Classic. (Author abstract - amended)

This must also be the reason that his new novel, his first in five years, has been so eagerly anticipated. Surely [Martin Amis] would reveal himself at last as a grown-up? Instead, \"Yellow Dog,\" set in London, follows and emulates the reversion to thuggery, boorishness and lust of a formerly decent and even feminist man named Xan Meo. A set of improbabilities has lead Xan to insult, by accident, a geriatric crime boss who then sics one of his heavies on Xan. Head- injured, Xan in his convalescence swears in front of his children, does his best to rape his wife, drinks prodigiously and even ogles the body of his 4-year-old daughter. \"Male violence,\" as Amis calls it, has turned Xan into a violent male, restoring his kinship with his monster of a father and rendering him a representative creature of Anglo-American civilization with its culture of rote prurience. Amis sees this culture as having mobilized the drives of aggression and lust to the exclusion of just about everything else. He calls it \"the obscenification of daily life,\" and his book participates with unseemly relish. The complicated and mechanical plot serves mostly to throw his characters into a kind of group grope. We have a porn actress (abused as a child, natch); the ill- favored writer for a pornographic London tabloid (his nose \"a considerable accumulation of flesh, but one uninfluenced by cartilage\"); the cognitively challenged king of England; his teenage daughter, the princess, whose sexual experiments have been intruded upon, filmed and distributed to eager consumers reading with one hand, and so on. There is a suburb called Foulness, an SUV model known as the Avenger, a guy named Semen Figner. Furthermore, Amis allows us to look on as an airliner goes down, the favored last word of passengers and crew alike being that old Anglo-Saxon term for the sexual act. You get the idea - and so, it would seem, does even the natural world: \"In the west a garish, indeed a porno sunset had established itself.\"

There is nothing in [JOAN DIDION]'s career so consistent as her debunking of received ideas and sentimental narratives - what, in \"Where I Was From,\" she calls \"the preferred self-image of most Californians.\" The great Californian booms in settlement and agriculture, and industries from aerospace to prison construction, have tended, as Didion pitilessly demonstrates, to depend on public funds. \"This extreme reliance of California on federal money,\" she writes, \"so seemingly at odds with the emphasis on unfettered individualism that constitutes the local core belief, was a pattern set early on.\" Didion may still literally be from California, but she has expatriated herself from the myth of the place. \"In some way,\" she said, \"the act of writing the book had freed me from this burden I was walking around with. It had freed me from the sense of not living up to the place I was from. There was an obvious impossibility in living up to the crossing story.\" \"Where I Was From\" is a bracing mix of personal and public history, and in it, Didion has subjected herself and her family as well as other Californians to her customary scrutiny. A few minutes later, the lights went out. When we learned the blackout was general, I was alarmed - as Didion's husband and housekeeper seemed to be. But she remained very calm, looking almost amused, and later, after I'd gone down the dark auxiliary stairs with some bottled water and wishes for good luck, I remembered something Didion once wrote and which I have now looked up: \"At Berkeley in the '50s no one was surprised by anything at all.\"

There is the crux of the problem: In the fiction of [George V. Higgins], cops and criminals alike are all too human - fallible, venal and charming. So it was in Higgins' first book, \"The Friends of Eddie Coyle\"-it might have been called \"The So-Called Friends of Eddie Coyle\"-and so it remains in \"At End of Day,\" the novel Higgins completed just before his death in November. \"At End of Day\"- impeccably observed and black as pitch, a kind of seeing in the dark- is a fitting capstone to a career that established Higgins as a great crime novelist and that ought to have established him as one of our finest novelists tout court. David Mamet considered him one of the three best novelists writing in English, and the judgment is not too implausible - save that Higgins, a master of dialogue, seemed to be listening as much as writing, and that what he heard was not any sort of English the Queen would recognize.

PEOPLE OFTEN ADVISE writers to write what they know. Richard Slotkin goes them one better: He writes what he has a PhD in. The author of Abe [Lincoln]: A Novel of the Young Lincoln (Henry Holt & Co., $27.50) is also a professor of history at Wesleyan University whose scholarly studies of the mythology of the American frontier have received two National Book Award nominations. \"Abe,\" which is Slotkin's third novel, does have its scholarly component: The only path to the forests of frontier Indiana is through the library. For his book, Slotkin says, he researched \"what newspapers people were reading, what kind of slang was in use, what ginseng roots were selling for in New Orleans-everything, the works.\" \"Abe\" offers us a Lincoln who has not yet submitted his emotions to discipline and diplomacy. Slotkin's Lincoln is prone not only to his famous melancholy, but to bouts of frightening, nearly murderous rage. When Abe \"whups\" a young man who has been bullying his stepbrother, the surrounding crowd sees in Lincoln \"a Thing there was no stopping nor pleading with, a Thing huge and raging, face of bone eyes of mica, No man gets vurry far in this life if he can't kill a man when he needs to.\" At length, of course, this Thing of righteous anger will lead to the Civil War and will bear out John Brown's prophecy that \"the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.\" It takes fiction rather than history to examine this angry young man. \"I've speculated about the sort of thing a scholarly or analytic biographer wouldn't spend much time on,\" Slotkin says. Not only was Lincoln rather guarded about his childhood, but \"as a grown man, he was passionate about repressing emotions. Because he protests so much, I believe he must have had some very powerful emotions to control. The fact that as a grown man he refused to go to his father's deathbed tells me that he was capable of a deep and abiding anger.\" In \"Abe,\" Lincoln thinks of life under his father's thumb as \"The Kingdom of Pap,\" a preserve of the sort of irrational and unaccountable authority that it is the job of enlightened Republican government to overcome. Pap even forces Abe to wrestle strangers in order to lay bets on him: \"The way Pap done things didn't set right. He ought to have asked Abe did he want to.\"