Thoughtful, amusing, and provocative, Making an Exit will transform the way you look at life's last passage. Because, as Murray discovers, death is, for many, not an ending but the start of something new. Author and journalist Sarah Murray never gave much thought to what might ultimately happen to her remains—that was, until her father died. While he'd always insisted that the "organic matter" left after a person takes their last breath had no significance, he surprised his family by setting down elaborate arrangements for the scattering of his own ashes. This unexpected last request prompted Murray to embark on a series of voyages to discover how our end is commemorated around the globe—and how we approach our own mortality. Spanning continents and centuries, Making an Exit is Murray's exploration of the extraordinary creativity unleashed when we seek to dignify the dead. Along the way, she encounters a cremation in Bali in which two royal personages are placed in giant decorative bulls and consigned to the afterlife in a burst of flames; a chandelier in the Czech Republic made entirely from human bones; a weeping ceremony in Iran; and a Philippine village where the casketed dead are left hanging in caves. She even goes to Ghana to commission her own fantasy coffin. The accounts of these journeys are fascinating, poignant, and funny. But this is also a very personal quest: on her travels, Murray is seeking inspiration for her own eventual send-off.

“A fascinating chronicle of mankind’s efforts to move food throughout history” from the Financial Times contributor and author of Making an Exit (The News & Observer). Today the average meal has traveled thousands of miles before reaching the dinner table. How on earth did this happen? Through delightful anecdotes and astonishing facts, Moveable Feasts tells the stories. Combining history, science, and politics, Financial Times writer Sarah Murray provides a fascinating glimpse into the extraordinary odysseys of food from farm to fork. She encounters everything from American grain falling from United Nations planes in Sudan to Mumbai’s tiffin men who, using only bicycles, carts, and their feet, deliver more than 170,000 lunches a day. Following the items on a grocery store shopping list, Murray shows how the journeys of food have brought about seismic shifts in economics, politics, and even art. By flying food into Berlin during the 1948 airlift, the Allies kept a city of more than two million alive for more than a year and secured their first Cold War victory, appealing to German hearts and minds—and stomachs. In nineteenth-century Buffalo, the grain elevator (a giant mechanical scooping machine) not only turned the city into one of America’s wealthiest, but it also had a profound influence on modern architecture, giving Bauhaus designers an important source of inspiration. In a thought-provoking and highly entertaining account, Moveable Feasts brings an entirely fresh perspective to the subject of food. And today, as global warming makes headlines and concerns mount about the “food miles” clocked by our dinners, Murray poses a contentious question: Is buying local always the most sustainable, ethical choice?

Snapchat. WhatsApp. Ashley Madison. Fitbit. Tinder. Periscope. How do we make sense of how apps like these-and thousands of others-have embedded themselves into our daily routines, permeating the background of ordinary life and standing at-the-ready to be used on our smartphones and tablets? When we look at any single app, it's hard to imagine how such a small piece of software could be particularly notable. But if we look at a collection of them, we see a bigger picture that reveals how the quotidian activities apps encompass are far from banal: connecting with friends (and strangers and enemies), sharing memories (and personally identifying information), making art (and trash), navigating spaces (and reshaping places in the process). While the sheer number of apps is overwhelming, as are the range of activities they address, each one offers an opportunity for us to seek out meaning in the mundane. Appified is the first scholarly volume to examine individual apps within the wider historical and cultural context of media and cultural studies scholarship, attuned to issues of politics and power, identity and the everyday.

This book provides step-by-step guidance for using innovative video modeling techniques to support the development of young children with autism spectrum disorders. It shows how to film personalized videos that highlight the exact skill that is being taught and how to incorporate these videos into the child's daily routine to encourage learning.

Majozi is a new boy in class. He tells the children that he is very strong and fast. But there is one thing that he cannot do ...

This book examines the phenomenon of Community Justice Centres and their potential to transform the justice landscape by tackling the underlying causes of crime. Marred by recidivism, addiction, family violence, overflowing courtrooms, crippling prison spending and extreme rates of incarceration, the criminal justice system is in crisis. Community Justice Centres seek to combat this by tackling the underlying causes of crime in a particular neighbourhood and working with local people to redesign the experience of justice and enhance the notion of community. A Community Justice Centre houses a court which works with an interdisciplinary team to address the causes of criminality such as drug addiction, cognitive impairment, mental illness, poverty, abuse and intergenerational trauma. The community thus becomes a key agent of change, partnering with the Centre to tackle local issues and improve safety and community cohesion. This book, based on research into this innovative justice model, examines case studies from around the world, the challenges presented by the model and the potential for bringing its learnings into the mainstream. This book will appeal to academics in law and criminology as well as psychology; it will also be of considerable interest to people working in the criminal justice system, including the police, government policy advisers, psychologists and social workers.

Why did the male nude come to occupy such an important place in ancient Greek culture? Despite extended debate, the answer to this question remains obscure. In this book, Sarah Murray demonstrates that evidence from the Early Iron Age Aegean has much to add to the discussion. Her research shows that aesthetics and practices involving male nudity in the Aegean had a complicated origin in prehistory. Murray offers a close analysis of the earliest male nudes from the late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, which mostly take the form of small bronze votive figurines deposited in rural sanctuaries. Datable to the end of the second millennium BCE, these figurines, she argues, enlighten the ritual and material contexts in which nude athletics originated, complicating the rationalizing accounts present in the earliest textual evidence for such practices. Murray's book breaks new ground by reconstructing a scenario for the ritual and ideological origins of nudity in Greek art and culture.

In this book, Sarah Murray provides a comprehensive treatment of textual and archaeological evidence for the long-distance trade economy of Greece across 600 years during the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. Analyzing the finished objects that sustained this kind of trade, she also situates these artifacts within the broader context of the ancient Mediterranean economy, including evidence for the import and export of commodities as well as demographic change. Murray argues that our current model of exchange during the Late Bronze Age is in need of a thoroughgoing reformulation. She demonstrates that the association of imported objects with elite self-fashioning is not supported by the evidence from any period in early Greek history. Moreover, the notional 'decline' in trade during Greece's purported Dark Age appears to be the result of severe economic contraction, rather than a severance of access to trade routes.