Dead Inside/Outside Alive:

The Lobster's Inescapable Contexts

Well into Yorgos Lanthimos's first transnational and English-speaking production, The Lobster (2015), people start moving in slow motion. Splatter, war scenes and B-horror films all come to mind as a group of people goes into the woods in order to hunt – other people. The group hunting consists of the ‘guests’ of a hotel, which is as austere as a totalitarian state summer camp and as hilarious as an outdated tourist resort, both tinged with an element of fear. The hunted group had previously been at the hotel, too, but they have run away to live in a semi-organised guerrilla community in the woods.

In the dystopian world of the film, people are required to check into this particular facility if they have become single – for example, left by their partner (as is the case with the protagonist David, played by Colin Farrell), or widowed. They have only forty-five days to acquire a plausible new partner among the other hotel guests in order to regain their freedom. Otherwise, they will be medically/technologically transformed into an animal of their choice. The hotel guests, however, do have one way to gain time: They can go hunting in the woods, where a number of escapees from the hotel are still lurking, as we learn. And here comes the main sequence of hunting on which I am focusing. The group of hotel detainees are seen first being assembled outside the hotel, given guns, loaded onto a bus and getting ready to hunt – those last action scenes appear in slow motion. The spectacular ‘chase’ that ensues is slowed down in an overtly self-conscious mockery of classical cinema slow-motion scenes, and the full length of the chase sequence is taken up by the duration of a whole song. As we see the ‘hotel inmates’ slowly moving and shooting their prey in the woods, their faces in awkward grimaces, we listen in full to a 1925 song by the Greek singer-songwriter Attik, titled ‘Από μέσα πϵθαμένος’ (‘Dead on the Inside’), performed in Greek by the legendary singer Danae in a later recording.

How new is New Labour? As the tenor of this book indicates, there are no instant revolutions in British government, rather a gradual evolution of ideas towards eventual change, either through legislation or differing patterns of political and social behaviour. Apart from restructuring the machinery for decision making within local authorities, many New Labour initiatives were established elements of the party's policy before Tony Blair assumed the leadership. The hollowing out of local government begun by Margaret Thatcher and John Major has continued, but with a rather different emphasis, as the implementation of many core local authority services are distributed to ad hoc agencies in the form of trusts and community-based local strategic partnerships. This chapter discusses local government in Britain under the New Labour government, devolution, the re-creation of London, the development of English regions, local government finance, and local government in Scotland and Wales.

This chapter introduces the three levels of Life Design – a flexible model for applying Life Design to different areas of your life depending on your current energy, goals, and context. Level 1 focuses on small daily habits and routines, helping you build momentum through quick wins. Level 2 expands to your portfolio of meaningful activities – including your job, side projects, and passions – encouraging exploration beyond binary career choices. Level 3 supports your boldest dreams and long-term aspirations, guiding you to prototype big ideas through joyful, low-risk steps. Whether you’re redesigning your morning, rethinking your work identity, or rekindling a forgotten dream, Life Design helps you start small, grow your confidence, and move forward with purpose. Real-life stories of Amir, Monica, Jonas, and Elena show how Life Design unfolds uniquely across levels – starting from tiny tweaks to transformative life shifts. You don’t need to leap – just loop forward, one step at a time.

One in five Americans struggle with a mental health condition in a given year, yet many struggle with accessing health insurance coverage for its treatment. This chapter examines the ways that health insurance coverage denials and delays contribute to challenges with access to care. Though the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act is meant to ensure comparable treatment in physical and behavioral health care, its goals are not fully realized. Drawing on interviews with patients and mental health professionals, as well as state examinations into health insurers’ parity violations, this chapter highlights the myriad ways that this population may face particular uphill battles in securing coverage for needed treatments. What’s more, physician administrative burden may be particularly pronounced in this setting because psychiatrists are less likely to have staffing to assist with prior authorization. While the case of Wit v. United Behavioral Health highlights the large-scale nature of behavioral health denials, the time required to pursue class action litigation is often infeasible in the setting of a mental health struggle.

Over a half century of sociolinguistic work has addressed various aspects of the speech of African Americans, often called African American Language (AAL) or African American English (AAE). While linguists were studying AAL for educational and theoretical linguistic purposes, demographic changes in the United States, including the Great Migration of African Americans, in combination with long-standing segregation, were creating situations in urban environments that helped establish and fortify what we know of as AAL in twenty-first-century America. The current chapter focuses on the twentieth-century development of AAL, using evidence from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall and Farrington 2021), a publicly available corpus of conversational speech, with data from several African American communities, including the Lower East Side of New York City (Manhattan), Princeville, NC; Rochester, NY; Valdosta, GA; and Washington, DC, to highlight the influence of the Great Migration on AAL and the development of regional sound patterns.

This chapter discusses alternative approaches to economic development in India, particularly Gandhian ideas. It explains how the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi have inspired social reformers, social movements and political leaders and parties both in India and in other parts of the world. It also discusses Gandhi's emphasis on the empowerment of disadvantaged sections of Indian society, self-sufficiency of villages and rural development.

This final substantive chapter considers the implications of European integration, globalisation and new security threats such as global terrorism for neutrality. Exploring the tensions between identity, security policy and the broader post-9/11 environment, it examines the likely shape and persistence of neutrality as a security policy, and the implications of its demise.

How Lives Matter:

Mom, I’m back and the Killing of Zak Kostopoulos

The camera in Dimitris Katsimiris's Mom, I’m back (2017) closely follows a woman's figure from behind as she walks first outside and then into a cemetery in order to attend a funeral procession. She moves closer to the assembled group of people. They start coming towards her, with some of the men in the group eventually attacking her and beating her to the ground. She falls, her wig drops to the ground, and her shaven head can now be seen, covered in blood. The shot is still from behind, but as the woman falls, the camera falls with her, too – maintaining the single take through which we have been watching the entire scene. Beating and spitting continue for some time, the spectator now sharing the viewpoint of the victim.

At some point the men stop – and this will be the only cut in this fourminute film which, therefore, is comprised of only two shots. When the viewpoint changes, we cut to a medium-long shot of the whole of the funeral assembly, standing opposite their wounded and bloodied victim. She stands up with some effort, while some of the men are holding back the one man who has been beating her most aggressively, looks at all of them, then turns and goes away. She is the son, now a trans woman, who has come back to attend her mother's funeral; they are the extended family and the community who have shown her how they respond to difference, with the brother who wants to impose his moral code most visibly being the most violent. Finally, this is a short film mediated by a camera which has already made a point on empathy. Falling, sharing the violence and the meaning of these blows, and witnessing the victim stand up again, the camera has assumed an ethical position: It has taken sides.