Political analyst and commentator Carol Platt Liebau takes a hard look at the pervasiveness of sex in today's culture and the havoc it wreaks on young people.

In recent years, most political theorists have agreed that shame shouldn't play any role in democratic politics because it threatens the mutual respect necessary for participation and deliberation. But Christina Tarnopolsky argues that not every kind of shame hurts democracy. In fact, she makes a powerful case that there is a form of shame essential to any critical, moderate, and self-reflexive democratic practice. Through a careful study of Plato's Gorgias, Tarnopolsky shows that contemporary conceptions of shame are far too narrow. For Plato, three kinds of shame and shaming practices were possible in democracies, and only one of these is similar to the form condemned by contemporary thinkers. Following Plato, Tarnopolsky develops an account of a different kind of shame, which she calls "respectful shame." This practice involves the painful but beneficial shaming of one's fellow citizens as part of the ongoing process of collective deliberation. And, as Tarnopolsky argues, this type of shame is just as important to contemporary democracy as it was to its ancient form. Tarnopolsky also challenges the view that the Gorgias inaugurates the problematic oppositions between emotion and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy. Instead, she shows that, for Plato, rationality and emotion belong together, and she argues that political science and democratic theory are impoverished when they relegate the study of emotions such as shame to other disciplines.

This comedy is partly imitated from an English piece called the Plain Dealer. It does not suit very well for the French stage; the manners are too rough and bold though much less so than in the original. The English seem to take too much liberty and the French too little. -Voltaire Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.

In a culture obsessed with sex, the era of Dad’s Playboy is long gone. Today, endless free porn is a click away and full-frontal photos appear on sites as accessible as Twitter, yet many couples struggle with the underlying issues of pornography. Emily Southwood considered herself to be sexually liberal—until her fiancé landed a job filming porn for a network reality TV show and her whole world changed overnight. Once confident in her relationship, she suddenly felt jealous, insecure, and obsessively comparative to the porn stars her fiancé was around everyday. She was forced to confront feelings she didn’t even know she had: about the treatment of women in the porn industry, the hush-hush attitude toward women watching pornography, and the unrealistic expectations about sex that are often propagated by porn. Prude is a humorous memoir that explores why there is so little communication about porn in relationships. Southwood tells the story of her transformation from feeling sexually liberal-minded to realizing she had issues with porn and the industry her fiancé was a part of. She reveals her bizarre journey to conquer her discomfort around porn—and how she ends up finding herself (and ultimately fixing her relationship for good) along the way.

This volume represents one of the first efforts to harvest the rapidly emerging scholarship in the field of American rural history. Building on the insights and methodologies that social historians have directed toward urban life, the contributors explore the past as it unfolded in the rural settings in which most Americans have lived during most of American history. The essays cover a broad range of topics: the character and consequences of manufacturing and consumerism in the antebellum countryside of the Northeast; the transition from slavery to freedom in Southern plantation and nonplantation regions; the dynamics of community-building and inheritance among Midwestern native and immigrant farmers; the panorama of rural labor systems in the Far West; and the experience of settled farming communities in periods of slowed economic growth. The central theme is the complex and often conflicting development of commercial and industrial capitalism in the American countryside. Together the essays place rural societies within the context of America's "Great Transformation."

Defends a libertarian social ethic that can support government action in pursuit of social goals and offers a new perspective on the relationship between social ethics, personal ethics, and environmental ethics.