Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital new-millennium narratives. Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Turning to Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Tinsley assesses black feminist critiques of marriage and then considers the models of motherhood offered in “Daddy Lessons,” interspersing these passages with memories from Tinsley’s multiracial family history. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism isn’t only for ciswomen. From pleasure politics and the struggle for black women’s reproductive justice to the subtext of blues and country music traditions, the landscape in this tour is populated by activists and artists (including Loretta Lynn) and infused with vibrant interpretations of Queen Bey’s provocative, peerless imagery and lyrics. In the tradition of Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s best-selling cultural histories, Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.

This debut novel--told in interviews--spans 20 years in the rise and fall of the charismatic leader of a seductive self-help movement. In the 1990s, a talk show host leads the personality movement, an integrative approach to radical self-transformation. Mayah, the movement's architect and celebrity advocate, adopts a curious, wild child named Masha Isle. A guinea-pig for the movement, and the key to its future, Isle is the subject of the eight interviews that comprise this book. As the interviewer's objectivity disintegrates--even as the movement's legitimacy becomes increasingly suspect--he becomes obsessed with Masha. And all of that is thrown into question when tragedy strikes. The stunning debut of a new literary talent, and a fascinating take on the cult of personality: about celebrities need to destroy and recreate themselves to stay relevant, public personalities coming to belong to everyone, and about our need to see everyone as a kind of celebrity.

Named by Esquire as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year: Chanel Miller's Know My Name meets Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Anthony Swofford's Jarhead in this powerful literary memoir of a young soldier driven to prove herself in a man's world. Raised by powerful women in a restrictive, sheltered Christian community in New England, Ryan Dostie never imagined herself on the front lines of a war halfway around the world. But then a conversation with an Army recruiter in her high-school cafeteria changes the course of her life. Hired as a linguist, she quickly has to find a space for herself in the testosterone-filled world of the Army barracks, and has been holding her own until the unthinkable happens: she is raped by a fellow soldier. Struggling with PTSD and commanders who don't trust her story, Dostie finds herself fighting through the isolation of trauma amid the challenges of an unexpected war. What follows is a riveting story of one woman's extraordinary journey to prove her worth, physically and mentally, in a world where the odds are stacked against her.

In Bodies in Formation, anthropologist Rachel Prentice enters surgical suites increasingly packed with new medical technologies to explore how surgeons are made in the early twenty-first century.

Architecture in Formation is the first digital architecture manual that bridges multiple relationships between theory and practice, proposing a vital resource to structure the upcoming second digital revolution. Sixteen essays from practitioners, historians and theorists look at how information processing informs and is informed by architecture. Twenty-nine experimental projects propose radical means to inform the new upcoming digital architecture. Featuring essays by: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher, Georges Teyssot, Mario Carpo, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Cache, Mark Linder, David Theodore, Evan Douglis, Ingeborg Rocker and Christian Lange, Antoine Picon, Michael Wen-Sen Su, Chris Perry, Alexis Meier, Achim Menges and Martin Bressani. Interviews with: George Legendre, Alessandra Ponte, Karl Chu, CiroNajle, and Greg Lynn. Projects by: Diller Scofidio and Renfro; Mark Burry; Yehuda Kalay; Omar Khan; Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab; Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Munitxa; Anna Dyson / Bess Krietemeyer, Peter Stark, Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE); Philippe Rahm; Lydia Kallipoliti and Alexandros Tsamis; Neeraj Bhatia, Infranet Lab; Jenny Sabin, Lab Studio; Luc Courschene, Society for Arts and Technology (SAT); Eisenman Architects; Preston Scott Cohen; Eiroa Architects; Michael Hansmeyer; Open Source Architecture; Andrew Saunders; Nader Tehrani, Office dA; Satoru Sugihara, ATLV and Thom Mayne, Morphosis; Reiser and Umemoto; Roland Snooks, Kokkugia; Philip Beesley; Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger SPAN; Michael Young; Eric Goldemberg, Monad Studio; Francois Roche; Ruy Klein; Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter.

Laitin portrays these Russian-speakers as a "beached diaspora" since the populations did not cross international borders; the borders themselves receded. He asks what will become of these populations. Will they learn the languages of the republics in which they live and prepare their children for assimilation? Will they return to a homeland many have never seen? Or will they become loyal citizens of the new republics while maintaining a Russian identity?

This monograph introduces recent developments in formation control of distributed-agent systems. Eschewing the traditional concern with the dynamic characteristics of individual agents, the book proposes a treatment that studies the formation control problem in terms of interactions among agents including factors such as sensing topology, communication and actuation topologies, and computations. Keeping pace with recent technological advancements in control, communications, sensing and computation that have begun to bring the applications of distributed-systems theory out of the industrial sphere and into that of day-to-day life, this monograph provides distributed control algorithms for a group of agents that may behave together. Unlike traditional control laws that usually require measurements with respect to a global coordinate frame and communications between a centralized operation center and agents, this book provides control laws that require only relative measurements and communications between agents without interaction with a centralized operator. Since the control algorithms presented in this book do not require any global sensing and any information exchanges with a centralized operation center, they can be realized in a fully distributed way, which significantly reduces the operation and implementation costs of a group of agents. Formation Control will give both students and researchers interested in pursuing this field a good grounding on which to base their work.