In an era preoccupied with ideals of friendship, Swift can appear something of an outlier. This chapter focuses on the significance of Swift’s friendship with so-called ‘Scriblerians’ (principally Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot). Famously, Swift cultivated a reputation for misanthropy that cut against the vaunted sociability of his time, but even in the day-to-day management of his friendships he was inclined to temper affection with reservation. Unlike Pope or Gay, Swift refuses to be drawn or to let friendship itself be drawn into a self-congratulatory mode. The chapter concludes with a sustained reading of ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift’ (wr. 1731), in which friendship becomes a battle for pre-eminence, a constant source of irritation insofar as it exposes one’s own inadequacies, but is no less genuine for it.

Population and Irish confessional demographics feature heavily in Swift’s political pamphlets. His writing on these topics helped shape popular perceptions of Ireland in the eighteenth century, a period that witnessed the emergence of an Irish diaspora across the British Atlantic world. This chapter considers the role that confessional demography played in Swift’s Irish political writings and the later influence of those writings on the formation of early anti-Irish nativism in colonial America. This first section looks at the role of demographic anxieties in A Modest Proposal. The second section addresses Swift’s concerns about religious dissent in Ireland. The third and final section explores the influence of Swift’s writings in colonial America.

Chapter 8 looks at Samuel in the theological context of the rest of the Scriptures: the Former Prophets or Deuteronomistic History, Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Qohelet, and the New Testament.

Environmental violence encompasses both the violence between humans and the Earth, and the violence that humans perpetrate on each other through the Earth. The concept of Sustainable Development, while aimed at improving both the human–Earth relationships and the relationships between humans, has problematic historical baggage: It is rooted in a Western idea of development, which is imbued in violence against various non-Western peoples and is perpetuating controversial takes on economic growth and appropriate technology. This renders the concept of Sustainable Development questionable, adding complications to the realization of its many, at times contradicting, goals. This chapter discusses issues in the concept of Sustainable Development and its implementation, suggesting a shift to the pursuit of a different concept: Sustainable Life.

Research has shown that taking a break, or an "incubation interval," can facilitate creative problem solving. One interpretation of this phenomenon is that it allows for task-switching and attentional flexibility, which can improve creative performance. Task-switching may allow individuals to break their mental set and identify solutions that were previously unavailable. It may also encourage the alternation between idea generation and evaluation, leading to attentional flexibility. This chapter discusses the evidence for the benefits of attentional flexibility and its relationship to mind-wandering, and presents a new study on the potential sources of benefit for task-switching on creativity.

This chapter explores how Swift used hoax and parody in his satirical writings and pamphlets. An opening section looks at the five short pamphlets that constituted the 1708–9 Bickerstaff hoax, in which Swift predicted and then falsely confirmed the death of the Whig astrologer John Partridge. The second section shifts the focus on the Drapier’s Letters, where Swift similarly created a mock-author, albeit to very different ends. The chapter argues that such vividly realised personae are characteristic of Swift’s writing and sometimes result in works that are neither straightforward hoax nor parody.

How do we think creatively about creating markets with new business models? This chapter examines the role that business models play in the development of new markets. This chapter provides an overview of the theory of market creation, and the logics of competition, and discusses some of the appropriate frameworks in the context of business model innovation. The chapter will also address how senior management could refresh the cognitive framing of the dominant design in order to identify and enable business model innovation.

This final chapter offers a theoretical paradigm for connecting the various methodological and empirical findings regarding how intersubjectivity serves as a basis for human development and learning via collaboration. Tomasello’s evolutionary account makes the case for the primacy of collaborative competence in the survival and development of the human species. He shows how collective intentionality signals the key distinction between humans and our closest animal relatives – the great apes. His theory and research are used as bases to argue for changing the paradigm that currently defines psychology, especially developmental and clinical fields. Recommendations for how to shift constructs and research in these fields to reflect interactive units of analysis are discussed. The transformative activist stance within cultural historical activity theory bridges psychology and education in its framework for rethinking development. This framework provides a way to argue for an emancipatory form of education that acknowledges the inherently collaborative nature of learning and development.

This chapter looks at the way that patent law resolved some of the other problems that chemical subject matter posed, particularly in working out how to define the boundaries of what was being examined or protected. While patent law employed a number of different strategies to delimit a fickle, empirically based, and changing chemical subject matter, this chapter highlights the central role that the materiality of chemical compounds played in helping the law to accommodate chemical inventions.

The efforts of academics, conservative think tanks, and political leaders on emphasizing markets and reducing government paid off after the election of President Ronald Reagan, which resulted in a new mix of government and markets, although not to the extent that many proponents of small government favored. There have been additional legal procedures and political oversight, which has made it more difficult to regulate some markets; government services have been outsourced, and government spending on regulation and social welfare has been reduced. Bill Clinton, influenced by the anti-government mood in the county, supported deregulation of telecommunications, welfare, and banking, but Congress reversed the banking deregulation after a Wall Street collapse in 2008 and was forced to spend billions of dollars to save the economy. Despite the anti-government mood, nearly all the laws and programs established in the New Deal and Great Society eras have remained on the books and have not been repealed. Besides the bailout, there were some other significant expansions of government including most notably the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obama Care.

This chapter lays out an argument for why a new approach to understanding children’s development in school is necessary. It first reviews the limitations of research with young children in Head Start programs and elementary schools serving large percentages of children in poverty within the US. These approaches are critiqued in light of findings that challenge the validity and reliability of teacher report and other commonly used measures. Issues of bias and cultural relevance in ways of defining the development of children placed at risk are discussed. Promising insights from research using alternative frames and units of analysis are then contrasted with those of large-scale studies. Finally, the rationale for focusing on collaborative competence as a key driver of development throughout childhood is elaborated. The potential of a developmental sequence of collaboration beginning with preschooler free play and leading into more complex collaborations during elementary school is proposed. Summaries of each chapter and how it contributes to this argument is provided.