Stars Illustrated Magazine. September 2018. New York. EDITION INTERNATIONALE. International edition. En couverture/On the cover: Maestro Roberto Milesi, Rabbi Moshe Wiener, Philippe & Marie Line, Maestro Lou Coppola, Rose-Marie Coppola, John David Coppola. Deluxe Edition in full colors, printed on heavy-stock glossy paper. Available worldwide.

tars Illustrated Magazine. New York. Oct. 2018. Special edition. The Middle East & Islam. On the cover: Gaith Altamimi, Raghda, Dr. Sami Aldeeb. Published in New York City by Times Square Press and Stars Illustrated publishing house. A deluxe edition in full colors, printed on heavy-stock glossy paper. Also available in ECONONY EDITION at a fraction of the price of the deluxe edition. Contact: [email protected]

Stars Illustrated Magazine. New York. Oct. 2018. Special edition. The Middle East & Islam. This is the Economy Edition. On the cover: Gaith Altamimi, Raghda, Dr. Sami Aldeeb. Published in New York City by Times Square Press and Stars Illustrated publishing house. A deluxe edition in full colors, printed on heavy-stock glossy paper is also available as a collector's item. Contact: [email protected]

Named a "Parents Best Children's Books 2018"! What would you do with a fallen star? When a little boy stumbles across a lost star, he decides to take care of it, putting it in a jar and carrying it with him everywhere. But when the sky calls out for its missing star, can the little boy and his sister figure out a way to return the star to its friends in the sky...even if it means saying goodbye forever? This warm-hearted and enchanting bedtime story celebrates the rewards of true friendship. Praise for Star in the Jar: "A cheery, warm-hearted tale, beautifully told." —The Guardian

New York has long been both America’s leading cultural center and its sports capital, with far more championship teams, intracity World Series, and major prizefights than any other city. Pro football’s “Greatest Game Ever Played” took place in New York, along with what was arguably history’s most significant boxing match, the 1938 title bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. As the nation’s most crowded city, basketball proved to be an ideal sport, and for many years it was the site of the country’s most prestigious college basketball tournament. New York boasts storied stadiums, arenas, and gymnasiums and is the home of one of the world’s two leading marathons as well as the Belmont Stakes, the third event in horse racing’s Triple Crown. New York sportswriters also wield national influence and have done much to connect sports to larger social and cultural issues, and the vitality and distinctiveness of New York’s street games, its ethnic institutions, and its sports-centered restaurants and drinking establishments all contribute to the city’s uniqueness. New York Sports collects the work of fourteen leading sport historians, providing new insight into the social and cultural history of America’s major metropolis and of the United States. These writers address the topics of changing conceptions of manhood and violence, leisure and social class, urban night life and entertainment, women and athletics, ethnicity and assimilation, and more.

The Black Star Collection at The Image Centre: the expectations, challenges, and results of a decade of research in a key photo agency’s print collection. In 2005, Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) University (TMU) acquired the massive collection Black Star Collection of the photo agency previously based in New York City—nearly 292,000 black-and-white prints. Preserved at The Image Centre at TMU, the images include iconic stills of the American Civil Rights movement by Charles Moore, among thousands of ordinary photographs that were classified by theme in the agency’s picture library. While the move of the collection from a corporate photo agency to a public cultural institution enables more access, researchers must still face the size of the collection, its structural organization, the materiality of the prints, and the lack of ephemera. Facing Black Star aims to fruitfully highlight this tension between research expectations and challenges. Coeditors Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie have gathered local, national, and international researchers ranging from graduate students to established scholars and curators to illuminate the staggering range of the collection, from its disquieting record of the Nazis’ rise to power to its visual archive of climate change. Each contribution highlights methodological, epistemological, and political issues inherent to conducting research in photographic archives and collections, such as indexing protocols and their impact on research, the photographic archive as a place of visibility and invisibility, and the photographic archive as a hermeneutic tool. Shedding new light on current issues in the theory and history of photography, this impressive volume containing 100 images will not only discuss the subjects portrayed in the photographs but will also address the history of photojournalism, the role of such a photographic archive in our Western societies, and ultimately photography as a medium. Like the other volumes of the RIC Books series (MIT Press/The Image Centre [formerly the Ryerson Image Centre]), this publication will appeal as much to academics of visual history as it will to photography enthusiasts in general.

The forward progress of society is not automatic and should not be taken for granted. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 can be viewed as ending his effort to deploy American prestige and power to forward change worldwide. Today, there are political forces seeking to stop progressive social, political, and economic change. Whatever the reasons, such forces are conspiring to impose authoritarianism to suppress the public’s desire for just, democratic government. The brutality, violence, viciousness, and racism (dystopia) of authoritarianism are becoming more and more the hallmark of world politics. Perhaps the most glaring aspect of this dystopia is the fact that the American state has been almost continuously at war for the past thirty years—including a sinister, dastardly drone assassination program. One means to obscure the ongoing conspiracy to ultimately impose outright dictatorship on the American people and the rest of the world, is to smear and malign critics of this conspiracy as guilty of conspiracy theory—advocating and embracing baseless fantasies.