Playing Politics, a rational-choice workbook of sixteen games, is designed to help students understand the logic behind political decision-making, from creating a constitution to formulating foreign policy.

Pay-to-Play Politics examines money and politics from different angles to understand a central paradox of American democracy: why, when the public and politicians decry money as the worst aspect of American politics, are there so few signs of change? Everyone from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz complains about the corrupting role of money and politics, but money is the lifeblood of their political survival. The public, too, deplores big money politics, despite regularly reelecting the richest candidates for office. The purpose of this book is to reconcile how—against many people's wishes—the connection between money and politics has come to define American democracy. Examining the issue from the perspective of the public, the courts, big business, Congress, and the presidency, Heath Brown argues that money can often be harmful to the political process, but not always in ways we expect or in ways we can directly observe. More money does not necessarily guarantee electoral, legislative, or executive victories, but money does greatly change political access, opportunity, and trust. Without a nuanced understanding of the nature of the problem, future reforms will be misguided and fruitless. Pay-to-Play Politics concludes by making concrete recommendations for reform, including feasible ways to reach bipartisan consensus.

A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.

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Playing Tough is an entertaining and thoroughly enlightening look at the unique and surprisingly outsized role that sports have played in politics and history. Ever since the bread and circuses of Rome, sports have been used as a tool to entertain the masses and to instill civic pride. Abrams shows both the positive and the negative ways in which sports and politics have coalesced, from the rabid nationalism of the 1936 Nazi Olympics, the political grudge match of the Louis and Schmeling fights, and the "futbol war" between Honduras and Costa Rica to the inspiring stories of South Africa's rugby nation-building and Muhammad Ali's brave antiwar stance, which nearly cost him his career. Abrams is an informed and impassioned writer who chronicles the profoundly creative and destructive influence that sports have on the political life of our nation and the world. This book will be of interest to any and all sports and politics enthusiasts and is a wonderful introduction for course creation and adoption.

‘...a fascinating account of one of the most important figures in PNG's first 40 years of Independence.’ – Sean Dorney, journalistBorn on a remote island in Papua New Guinea to a migrant Chinese father and indigenous mother, Julius Chan overcame poverty, discrimination, and family tragedy to become one of Papua New Guinea’s longest-serving and most influential politicians.His 50-year career, including two terms as Prime Minister, encompasses a crucial period of Papua New Guinea’s history, particularly its coming of age from an Australian colony to a leading democratic nation in the South Pacific. Chan has played a significant role during these decades of political, economic and social change. Playing the Game offers unique insights into one of the world’s most ancient and complex tribal cultures. It also explores the vexed issues of increasing corruption, government failure, and the unprecedented exploitation of its precious natural resources.In the first memoir by a Papua New Guinean leader in forty years, Sir Julius Chan explores his decision in 1997 to hire a private military force, Sandline International, to quell the ongoing civil crisis in Bougainville. This controversial deal sparked worldwide outrage, cost Sir Julius the prime ministership and led to ten years in the political wilderness. He was re-elected as Governor of New Ireland in 2007, aged 68, a seat he has held ever since.Playing the Game is an authentic and compelling account of Chan’s private and political life, and offers a rare insight into how the modern nation of Papua New Guinea came to be, the vision and values it was founded on, and the extraordinary challenges it faces in the 21st century.

The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.