Art Nature Dialogues offers interviews with artists working with, in, and around nature and the environment. The interviews explore art practices, ecological issues, and values as they pertain to the siting of works, the use of materials, and the ethics of artmaking. John K. Grande includes interviews with Hamish Fulton, David Nash, Bob Verschueren, herman de vries, Alan Sonfist, Nils-Udo, Michael Singer, Patrick Dougherty, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and others.

A series of conversations about science in graphic form, on subjects that range from the science of cooking to the multiverse. Physicist Clifford Johnson thinks that we should have more conversations about science. Science should be on our daily conversation menu, along with topics like politics, books, sports, or the latest prestige cable drama. Conversations about science, he tells us, shouldn't be left to the experts. In The Dialogues, Johnson invites us to eavesdrop on a series of nine conversations, in graphic-novel form—written and drawn by Johnson—about “the nature of the universe.” The conversations take place all over the world, in museums, on trains, in restaurants, in what may or may not be Freud's favorite coffeehouse. The conversationalists are men, women, children, experts, and amateur science buffs. The topics of their conversations range from the science of cooking to the multiverse and string theory. The graphic form is especially suited for physics; one drawing can show what it would take many words to explain. In the first conversation, a couple meets at a costume party; they speculate about a scientist with superhero powers who doesn't use them to fight crime but to do more science, and they discuss what it means to have a “beautiful equation” in science. Their conversation spills into another chapter (“Hold on, you haven't told me about light yet”), and in a third chapter they exchange phone numbers. Another couple meets on a train and discusses immortality, time, black holes, and religion. A brother and sister experiment with a grain of rice. Two women sit in a sunny courtyard and discuss the multiverse, quantum gravity, and the anthropic principle. After reading these conversations, we are ready to start our own.

Bridget Riley has pursued a course of rigorous abstraction for some 40 years, from her celebrated black and white Op Art works in the 1960s to the complex colour paintings of the 1990s. This volume contains an illuminating series of dialogues between Riley and well-known figures from the art world.

From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. We are social animals. Our very lives depend on our relationships with people. Knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess, without which our other talents can only take us so far. Drawing from the ideas and examples of Pericles, Queen Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King Jr, and many others, Greene teaches us how to detach ourselves from our own emotions and master self-control, how to develop the empathy that leads to insight, how to look behind people's masks, and how to resist conformity to develop your singular sense of purpose. Whether at work, in relationships, or in shaping the world around you, The Laws of Human Nature offers brilliant tactics for success, self-improvement, and self-defense.

Swiss critic Johann Georg Sulzer's Dialogues on the Beauty of Nature (1750) and Reflections on Certain Topics of Natural History (1745) are exemplary specimens of eighteenth-century European theology, philosophy, natural history, and aesthetics. Sulzer's contemporaries-notably Goethe-read him with attention. Eric Miller's elegant translation comes with a vivid, informative, and strongly contextualizing introduction. Sulzer's early works are a curio cabinet of the philosophical and theological arguments that exercised and enticed the intelligentsia of his period. These topics and arguments have by no means forfeited pertinence today.

A philosopher makes the case for thinking of works of art as tools for investigating ourselves In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

This book analyses the artistic and cultural legacy of Western Islamic societies and their interactions with Islamic, Christian and Jewish societies in the framework of the late medieval Mediterranean, from a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives. The book, organised in four parts, addresses the Andalusi legacy from its presence in the East and the West; analyses the relations and transfers between Al-Andalus and the artistic productions of the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula; explores other manifestations of the Andalusi legacy in the fields of knowledge, construction, identity and religious studies; and reconsiders ornamental transfers and exchanges in artistic manifestations between East and West across the Mediterranean basin. Chapter 2 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.