Columbia University Press

This week our featured book is Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Thomas Dunlap with a foreword by Creston Davis. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today, we have an excerpt from Sloterdijk’s look at Soren Kierkegaard. The 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth was May 5th, 2013.

This week our featured book is Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Thomas Dunlap with a foreword by Creston Davis. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today, we have an excerpt from Sloterdijk’s look at Plato, one of the most important thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition.

"Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault," by Peter Sloterdijk

This week our featured book is Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Thomas Dunlap with a foreword by Creston Davis. Be sure to enter our book giveaway by Friday for a chance to win a FREE copy! Today, we have an excerpt from the foreword to our English translation of Philosophical Temperaments, “Analyzing Philosophy’s Temperamental Symptom,” by Creston Davis.

This week our featured book is Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, by Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Thomas Dunlap with a foreword by Creston Davis. Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its author here on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed and our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Philosophical Temperaments. To enter our Book Giveaway, simply fill out the form below with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on May 24th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Today, we will finish up our week featuring The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, with a post explaining what the Robin Hood Foundation is and how it attempts to address the problem of poverty in New York City. (Don’t forget to enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!)

The Robin Hood Foundation finds, funds, and partners with programs that have proven they are an effective way to combat poverty in New York City. Robin Hood employs a rigorous system of metrics and third-party evaluation to ensure grantee accountability. The board pays all administrative and fundraising costs, so 100% of donations goes directly to helping New Yorkers in need build better lives. The foundation also works closely with grantees to help make them more effective, ensuring that they will assist even more people.

The Robin Hood Foundation is one of the premier poverty-fighting nonprofit organizations focused on combating poverty in New York. This aim leads the foundation to support more than 200 programs in the city, ranging from education reform to stable housing, from food availability to literacy, and from health insurance and healthcare availability to disaster relief.

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This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have a couple of videos from the excellent Vimeo channel of the Robin Hood Foundation. In the first video, Michael Weinstein explains the Robin Hood Foundation approach, and in the second, he explains “benefit-cost ratios.”

Our Approach from Robin Hood on Vimeo.

Michael Weinstein Benefit-Cost Video from Robin Hood on Vimeo.

This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have a guest post from Michael Weinstein, in which he explains how The Robin Hood Foundation decides what to fund when there are so many important programs that need funding.

The Robin Hood Foundation and “Relentless Monetization”
Michael M. Weinstein

We philanthropists face gnarly decisions. To fight poverty, do we train chronically unemployed women to drive commercial trucks or instead pour money into pre-kindergarten programs for poor youngsters? Do we train male ex-offenders to serve as drug-abuse counselors for adolescent boys or fund charter schools? We can’t afford to do everything.

In The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, Ralph Bradburd and I set forth a framework for making the right choices — spending philanthropic dollars with maximum impact.

Our framework, which we dub “relentless monetization,” uses the workhorse of modern economics, benefit-cost analysis, to help funders decide which grants to make. Spending dollars on programs with the highest benefit/cost ratios puts dollars where they do the most good. For example, taking dollars out of one project and spending them on a project whose benefit/cost ratio is twice as high amounts to raising and spending twice as many philanthropic dollars.

The framework does indeed bite hard. Here’s one of many examples.

At the Robin Hood Foundation, we once proudly funded what we saw as the best permanent supportive housing residence in the city. The grantee takes in homeless families, provides them excellent mental-health and other services, and keeps them safely, permanently housed. Using representative numbers, Robin Hood might have spent $300,000 a year to help house 60 families. We say this residence was best because none–not one–of its families returned to the streets. Case closed: great grant.

Or was it? Once our metric algorithms were in place and staff did the arithmetic, the benefit/cost calculation came in low—indeed, very low. Did we immediately pull the plug? No. Perhaps our algorithms were wrong and were missing key benefits. Perhaps our equations were right but our numbers were wrong. We did eventually pull the funding plug, but we did so only after two years of scrutiny. The answer was that permanent supportive housing is a frightfully expensive way to fight poverty. Here, Robin Hood would spend $300,000 a year to save the same 60 families year in and year out. We do that nowhere else. At our schools, the students in the sixth grade change each year. In our carpentry-training program, the trainees change each year. In our micro-lending programs, borrowers change each year.

Our point is not to criticize permanent supportive-housing programs. They pursue an inspiring and important mission. But for Robin Hood in particular, the strategy is not cost-effective. We can spend the $300,000 in other ways that lift significantly more poor New Yorkers out of poverty over any defined period.

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This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press. Enter our Goodreads book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy!

Today, we have an excerpt from the first chapter of The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving: “An Overview of Relentless Monetization.”

The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving

“The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving is a must read for all ‘do-gooders,’ including the donors who give money and the nonprofits that spend it. The authors have a marvelous way of conveying complex concepts in simple English, including one of the best explanations of benefit-cost analysis that I have ever read. This book is a true gem.” — Sheldon Danziger, University of Michigan

This week our featured book is The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving, by Michael M. Weinstein and Ralph M. Bradburd, published by Columbia Business School Publishing, an imprint of Columbia University Press.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its authors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering TWENTY FREE copies of The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving through a book giveaway at Goodreads. To enter our book giveaway, simply click here and follow the instructions for entering. The giveaway runs through May 27th, so enter today for your chance to win!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving

by Michael M. Weinstein

Giveaway ends May 27, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

“This is a great book for both non-profit funders and non-profit leaders. The book’s “relentless monetization” concept — if widely deployed — would dramatically boost the impact of the independent sector. Now let’s get right to work and act on this great advice.” — Mark Tercek, President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy

“[Translators] are witnesses, with tales to tell. We are writers, with our own voices. Whenever we see literary culture distorted for political advantage, it matters very much that we speak.”—Maureen Freely, from “Misreading Orhan Pamuk”

In her essay “Misreading Orhan Pamuk,” from In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Maureen Freely discusses translating the works of Pamuk and how her role as translator changed after Pamuk became embroiled in a political controversy. In this excerpt, Freely considers the importance of the translator in contextualizing as well as defending the work of an author:

When Snow went out into the world, I again revised my job description. A translator did not just need to find the right words, stay in close conversation with the author, and run interference for him as the book made its way through the publication process. She also had to do everything she could to contextualize the book for readers who were not familiar with Turkey—not inside the text but outside it, in journals and newspapers, and at conferences, symposia, literature festivals, and a long sequence of very frustrating dinner parties. As I made the rounds, I was at first encouraged by those who said to me, “I knew nothing about Turkey until I read Snow, you know, but now I can see it’s a really fascinating country so I’d like to know more about it.” I thought the most important thing was that they were interested. Only good could come of that, I thought.

I was wrong.

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“Translation is, in a sense, the slowest possible reading. You’re watching the great writer build a story arc, and you’re watching sentence by sentence how that arc is being shaped. In that sense it slows down your reading and studying of an author.”—Susan Bernofsky

In a recent interview with Words Without Borders, Susan Bernofsky, coeditor with Esther Allen of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, discussed her own practice as a translator as well as a variety of other issues related to translation. Among other topics, Bernofsky talks about “stealth gloss,” whether or not to “domesticate” translations, whether it is better to translate a text by a dead or a living author, and what book she views as the “holy grail” of translation:

Here’s an excerpt from the interview (Shaun Randol (SR) is the interviewer for Words Without Borders. You can read the full interview here):

SR: Ultimately do you think translating makes one a better writer?

SB: Yes I do, because it makes you think consciously about how sentences are put together, about the actual techniques the writer used to make this sentence have this effect. Translating makes you really conscious of the richness of synonyms out there as well as sentence structure. I constantly hear from students about how translating has changed how they approach their own fiction.

Translation is, in a sense, the slowest possible reading. You’re watching the great writer build a story arc, and you’re watching sentence by sentence how that arc is being shaped. In that sense it slows down your reading and studying of an author.

SR: Would you prefer it if we all spoke one language?

SB: No, because we think differently in different languages. To take away the multiplicity of languages is to take away difference, and difference is interesting. It would be bland and boring if everyone spoke the same language. The literary output that we produce would also be much more monotonous.

SR: Does translation into English enhance English language supremacy or does it preserve language plurality by allowing writers to use their own languages?

SB: The latter. You already have the phenomenon of writers trying to write straight in English so as to have direct access to that global market, but I think that when we translate foreign literature we are creating interest in the foreign culture, thereby also the foreign language.

“To say of translation—as is so often said—that ‘the original meaning is always lost’ is to deny the history of literature and the ability of any text to be enriched by the new meanings that are engendered as it enters new contexts—that is, as it remains alive and is read anew.”—Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky

In their introduction to In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky explore the importance and complexities of translation in a world where English is becoming increasingly dominant. Below in an excerpt from their introduction, “A Culture of Translation”:

Today, the English-language translator occupies a particularly com­plex ethical position. To translate is to negotiate a fraught matrix of in­teractions. As a writer of the language of global power, the translator into English must remain ever aware of the power differential that tends to subsume cultural difference and subordinate it to a globally uniform, market-oriented monoculture. Weltliteratur is no longer (and may never have been) politically, culturally, or ethically neutral. At the same time, the failure to translate into English, the absence of translation, is clearly the most effective way of all to consolidate the global monoculture and exclude those who write and read in other languages from the far-reach­ing global conversation for which English is increasingly the vehicle.

Nevertheless, contemporary discussions of translation’s role— particularly in the English-speaking world—sometimes attest to a stance that barely differs from that of Dante’s Virgil, mourning for a lost prelapsarian oneness and concomitant frustration with the affliction of linguistic diversity. This attitude, as David Bellos observes, portrays translation as little more than “a compensatory strategy designed only to cope with a state of affairs that falls far short of the ideal.” All transla­tion, in this view, is invariably an inadequate substitute for an original text that can only be legitimately apprehended in the purity of its origi­nal language.

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This week our featured book is In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, Edited by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the books and their editors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means (For more on the book, you can read Haruki Murakami on translating The Great Gatsby.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on May 10 at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

“The essays in In Translation, exploring both the larger, complex questions of translation’s role and function in the world of literature and the more detailed, word by word dilemmas faced by every translator, are consistently stimulating, engaging, and eye-opening, not to speak of eloquent and occasionally even dramatic and/or funny — I came away from reading them with a host of new ideas and insights. This collection is a valuable addition to any library of books on translation or literature in general.” — Lydia Davis

This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert, Professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University. We’ll be featuring content from the book and original posts from the author all week! Be sure to enter our book giveaway by 1 PM TODAY for a chance to win a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence!

Today, in the final day of our Book Giveaway, we have “New Welfarism, Veganism, and Capitalism,” another excerpt from Animal Oppression and Human Violence. In this concluding chapter, Nibert explains why veganism is a global imperative, and how we can work around the barriers to this goal thrown up by the capitalist system.
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This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert, Professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University. We’ll be featuring content from the book and original posts from the author all week! Be sure to enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence!

Today we have the second half of a guest post by David A. Nibert (read the first half here). In this post, Nibert argues that the pervasive presence of domesecration in modern society has profoundly negative effects on humans as well as animals.

In the United States, the relentless quest for profits through the exploitation of domesecrated animals was primarily responsible for the continual expropriation of Native American lands for expanding ranching enterprises. Once indigenous peoples, buffalo and other “obstacles” were cleared from the Great Plains – territory U.S. leaders once promised to Native Americans in perpetuity – wealthy investors flooded the region with cows and sheep. Railways and giant slaughterhouses, constructed and staffed by oppressed immigrants, allowed the rise of the powerful U.S. “meat” industry. Not long after Blackmar’s drivel about the “service” animals were “rendering” to humans, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle provided a true picture of the nightmarish condition of domesecrated animals in Chicago slaughterhouses and the predatory treatment of the workers there.
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This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert, Professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University. We’ll be featuring content from the book and original posts from the author all week! Be sure to enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence!

Today we have the first half of a guest post by David A. Nibert, in which he explains how he first came to be aware of the issues he discusses in his book, and delves into the history of the phenomenon of “widespread and systemic oppression of other animals by humans.”

I never thought much about other animals or food production when I was younger. As a college sociology student in the early 1970s, I learned about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression – but scarcely a word was mentioned about the oppression of other animals. Professors spouted the traditional prattle about the virtues of animal “domestication” and the “mutually beneficial partnership” that resulted. This perspective has remained largely unchanged for decades and reflects a statement made in 1896 by Frank Wilson Blackmar, who later would become president of the American Sociological Association.

The domestication of animals led to a great improvement in the race. It gave an increased food supply through milk and the flesh of animals. . . . One after another animals have rendered service to man. They are used for food or clothing, or to carry burdens and draw loads. The advantage of their domestication cannot be too greatly estimated.
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This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert. We’ll be featuring content from the book and original posts from the author all week! Today, we have Nibert’s Introduction to Animal Oppression and Human Violence, in which he explains his argument against the “obvious and unassailable” view of the positive role that domesticating animals has played in human development. And be sure to enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence.

Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict, by David A. Nibert

This week our featured book is Animal Oppression and Human Violence, by David A. Nibert. Throughout the week, we will be featuring the book and its author here on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed and our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Animal Oppression and Human Violence. To enter our Book Giveaway, simply fill out the form below with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 19th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

Our giveaway is now complete and the winners have been notified via email. Thanks to all who participated!

“To forestall these rapid planetary transformations from bringing civiliza­tion to the brink requires a solution to the impending climate and environ­mental crisis that transcends short-term fixes. It calls for a major paradigm shift.”—Vivien Gornitz

In the following excerpt from Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future, Vivien Gornitz argues that we are now in a new epoch in which human activity is having a profound impact on the environment:

Rising seas are just one symptom of a much larger unfolding environmental crisis—one manifestation of the multidimensional planetary changes now under way. We now live in the Anthropocene epoch—increasingly marked by the human touch. Ever since humanity first learned to control fire, peo­ple have transformed the Earth’s surface. The agricultural revolution further altered natural vegetation patterns. However, after the Industrial Revolu­tion of the late 18th century, and increasingly so after the mid-20th cen­tury, people have become major environmental and geologic agents. We are reshaping the planet by literally moving mountains, diverting water flows, denuding forests, eroding soils, altering biogeochemical cycles (i.e., nitrogen and phosphorus overloading), acidifying the ocean, diminishing biodiver­sity, and changing the climate. Exponential population growth coupled with rapid economic and technological development drive this planetary trans­mutation, unparalleled in Earth’s history. As demand rises, growing scarci­ties of food, water, and mineral resources will increasingly stress our fragile environment.

Climate change brings additional stresses. Although some agricultural re­gions may benefit from a longer growing season resulting from additional warmth or extra rainfall, other regions stand to become drier or even turn into dust bowls. Crop yields may drop, unless more drought- resistant va­rieties can be developed in time. Elsewhere, soil fertility may decline due to erosion of topsoil. Groundwater mining may lower the water table enough to make pumping water for irrigation too costly (e.g., the Ogallala Aquifer in Oklahoma and Texas). Increasing saltwater encroachment due to sea level rise may render many fertile low-lying deltaic or coastal farmlands (e.g., the Sacramento–San Joaquin valley, California, the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, or the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, Bangladesh) increasingly unproductive.

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In the following excerpt from Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future, Vivien Gornitz examines how New York City is reacting to and planning for the possibility of flooding due to rising seas. (To read the excerpt in a full screen, click on the icon on the lower right-hand corner)