A Fascinating Investigation of Industry’s Modern Ruins and the "Deindustrial Sublime."

Ah, the corporate world. A place where dreams go to die and Excel spreadsheets go to multiply. Or is it? What if I told you that beneath the surface of mind-numbing meetings and soul-crushing cubicles lies a secret world of corporate ninjas, silently shaping the fate of companies and careers alike? Welcome, dear reader, to "The Art of the Corporate Ninja: Succeeding in Business Without Losing Your Soul (or Your Mind)". If you've picked up this book, chances are you're either: A bright-eyed newcomer to the corporate jungle, eager to learn its ways (bless your heart) A battle-hardened veteran, wondering if there's more to life than TPS reports Someone who accidentally grabbed this instead of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (honest mistake, they're practically the same thing) Regardless of which category you fall into, strap in. You're about to embark on a journey that will transform you from a mere corporate drone into a lean, mean, PowerPoint-presenting machine. "In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love." - Warren Buffett Okay, that's a nice quote and all, but let's be real. Not all of us can be Warren Buffett, sipping on Cherry Coke while making billion-dollar decisions. Some of us are just trying to make it through the day without stapling our tie to important documents or falling asleep in a meeting about meetings. That's where the art of the corporate ninja comes in. This book will teach you how to: Navigate office politics with the stealth of a shadow Deliver presentations that don't put people to sleep (a true superpower) Master the art of looking busy while doing absolutely nothing Climb the corporate ladder without stepping on too many fingers And most importantly, maintain your sanity and sense of humor in a world gone mad But wait, there's more! Unlike other business books that take themselves way too seriously, this one comes with a healthy dose of sarcasm, pop culture references, and the occasional dad joke. Because let's face it, if you can't laugh at the absurdity of corporate life, you're in for a long, dreary career. So whether you're aiming for the corner office or just trying to survive until Friday, this book has something for you. It's part survival guide, part comedy routine, and part Zen koan (yes, really). By the time you're done, you'll be slicing through red tape with the precision of a samurai sword and deflecting pointless emails faster than Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix. A word of warning: reading this book may cause uncontrollable eye-rolling, sudden outbursts of laughter, and a strong desire to karate chop your keyboard. Side effects may include increased productivity, better work-life balance, and the ability to see through corporate BS from a mile away. Ready to unleash your inner corporate ninja? Turn the page, young grasshopper. Your journey to business badassery begins now. Oh, and if your boss catches you reading this at work, just tell them it's a very serious book about synergizing paradigms and leveraging core competencies. They'll either be impressed or so confused they'll leave you alone. Win-win. Now, let's begin our training. Hajime!

The largest, wealthiest corporations have gained unprecedented power and influence in contemporary life. From cradle to grave the decisions made by these entities have an enormous impact on how we live and work, what we eat, our physical and psychological health, what we know or believe, whom we elect, and how we deal with one another and with the natural world around us. At the same time, government seems ever more subservient to the power of these oligopolies, providing numerous forms of corporate welfare—tax breaks, subsidies, guarantees, and bailouts—while neglecting the most basic needs of the population. In Corporate Power, Oligopolies, and the Crisis of the State, Luis Suarez-Villa employs a multidisciplinary perspective to provide unprecedented documentation of a growing crisis of governance, marked by a massive transfer of risk from the private sector to the state, skyrocketing debt, great inequality and economic insecurity, along with an alignment of the interests of politicians and a new, minuscule but immensely wealthy and influential corporate elite. Thanks to this dysfunctional environment, Suarez-Villa argues, stagnation and a vanishing public trust have become the hallmarks of our time.

How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? Who represents hope? Who are the cautionary tales? Unfinished Business argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, and specifically apart from images of, and works by and about African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. It insists that Michael Jackson's performances and coverage of his life, plays featuring Detroit, plans for the city's postindustrial revitalization, and Detroit installations The Heidelberg Project and Mobile Homestead have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S., particularly about the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid 1980s and 2016. Jackson and Detroit offer examples of the racialization of deindustrialization, how it operates as a structure of feeling and as representations as well as a shift in the dominant mode of production, and how industrialization's successor mode, financialization, uses imagery both very similar to and very different from its predecessor.

It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us—the cities we live in—that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity. Explore Everything is an account of the author’s escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.