Just a century separates the practical origins of radio transmission in 1895 and the first smartphone in 1997: a century which saw the rapid extensions of experimentation into widespread applications. The wireless revolution would transform almost every aspect of human interaction and society, from finance and business to political propaganda and the control of crime. Communication ceased to be a matter of space, and wireless communication was a revolution with as important transformative impact as any in history.

For some, bitch is a four-letter word. Cast into the same category as expletives like fuck and shit, bitch has been branded profane, obscene, and indecent. As a tabooed word, it has often been censored or avoided altogether by the mainstream media, to protect tender eyes and ears. In its written form, bitch been expurgated from books and newspapers. In the past, bitch was considered to be defamatory, a dangerous smear on a woman’s character, and leveling the slur at an innocent party could land the offender in court. In its spoken form, bitch has been bleeped in songs and muted in movies, while some radio stations and television networks have been fined for using it. Thanks to the many pioneers pushing the word’s use, bitch has undergone a dramatic “unbleeping” over time. As taboos changed, the word started to be used more openly. Nowadays, bitch is everywhere. This chapter looks at the many bans on bitch and controversies surrounding the word, both past and present.

The growth of Bernstein’s career coincided with the growth of television, so many knew him through his broadcasts. His fifty-three hour-long award-winning Young People’s Concerts (1958−72) are among his most significant television work and were seen at their height by nearly ten million in the USA and in over forty countries. In each show, the maestro would expound on some musical principle, with clarity and appeal, accompanied by demonstrations by him and the New York Philharmonic. While the series clearly shows Bernstein’s brilliant pedagogy, a deeper story lies beneath. No other musician in the late twentieth century so fully addressed the issues of the day as did Bernstein, and no other classical musician has ever been so widely seen. Through his Young People’s Concerts, the maestro not only spread his love of music but also raised his artistic voice from this bully pulpit to work for a better world.

No one so inspired the generation of American musicians born in the 1940s and 1950s as did Bernstein, an ‘inescapable’ and ‘incontroverible’ icon of the 1960s and beyond. His celebrity was particularly linked to the explosive growth of television, beginning with appearances on Omnibus (from 1954) and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts (from 1958). Two texts complicate his reputation as Wunderkind of American music: Tom Wolfe’s ‘Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s’ (1970) and Leon Botstein’s ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’ (1983). But by the time of his 100th birthday celebrations in 2018, Bernstein’s stature as cultural icon seemed intact and secure, resting largely on West Side Story.

Bernstein wrote five books during his life: The Joy of Music (1959), The Infinite Variety of Music (1966), Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (1962), The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (1976), and Findings (1982). The first four were part of his desire to make his lectures and commentary from his televised appearances available in written form and the fifth book is a compilation of mostly minor writings from throughout Bernstein’s life. This chapter is a summary of the contents of each of these books, with commentary on what the more substantial efforts tell us about the author’s musical philosophy. The major essay from Findings considered here at some length is Bernstein’s senior honours thesis written while a student at Harvard: ‘The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music’. Although better known as a conductor and composer, Bernstein’s writings are also important representations of his thinking.

The structure of Shakespearean drama does not fit easily into the novel-like episodic sequence of the television series. It is therefore no wonder that none of the serialized adaptations of Romeo and Juliet seem to have survived the first season of their broadcast. Nonetheless, the two series examined here, Star-Crossed (created by Meredith Averill for CW, 2014) and Still Star-Crossed (created by Heather Mitchell for ABC, 2017) are worthy of critical attention for a number of reasons. They appear to take radically different paths in appropriating the famously ill-fated romance to contemporary television screens, both in terms of genre and setting, language and style, and also in the way they intend to open up the play’s dramatic structure into a potentially endless sequence of episodes.

The present chapter seeks to provide a selective reference guide to the screen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet up to 2021. This chapter is divided into three sections listing films, television adaptations as well as derivatives and citations. In each section, adaptations are classified in chronological order followed by an alphabetical list of relevant critical studies, and a system of cross-references has been designed for those entries making reference to two or more adaptations.

This chapter focuses not on a particular literary technology, but on the shifts in the literary field that occurred in response to the threat of obsolescence at the hands of competing media such as film and television. Adapting marketing techniques from those media, and capitalizing on new formats such as the paperback, the literary field broadened to expand its appeal to an ever-widening “middlebrow” reading public. By the 1930s, Jaillant argues, these developments in format and marketing had effectively broken down any rigid dividing line between “literary” and “nonliterary” reading publics, so that advertisements for a bestseller such as Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth and James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses could appear side by side.

The final myth, new technology threatens writing, brings us full circle back to myth 1, because it keeps limiting correct writing. It puts correct writing at odds with informal digital writing, even when correct writing is critiqued for being stodgy. We get the idea that correct writing is controlled, whereas informal digital writing is careless, and we limit who reads correct writing and what writing is studied in school. Closer to the truth is that if you are alarmed by something – say, text message slang – you will notice it more, even if most written English is neither changing nor fundamentally different. Informal writing is not the same thing as careless writing, and it is both similar and different from formal writing on the writing continuum.

Modern techniques of communication have often and from early on been seen as a major precondition for the rise of nationalism and the invention of nations.1 Although many studies have emphasized the relationship between the media and nationalism, it has hardly been analyzed in a broader historical perspective. Media did indeed often propagate national identities or nationalist views. At the same time, they supported national identities, nationalism, and nationhood by creating networks of distribution, a common language and a common situation of simultaneous reception. Therefore, this chapter discusses the media as part of the discursive invention of nations and as a specific infrastructure for the rise of nationalism. At the same time, we have to consider that some media have supported not only nationalism, but also other identities, such as international, regional, or local identities at certain times.

The widespread adoption of social media, mobile phones, and online dating apps has drawn more attention toward the importance of media technologies in romantic relationships. However, most observed relational functions and effects of digital media are not novel. Rather, they have been documented previously with traditional media such as books, letters, radio, newspapers, recorded music, television, and the telephone. Romantic relational phenomena manifest across both traditional and digital media due to similar affordances. This chapter provides an overview of research on traditional media across relational processes (mate seeking, relationship initiation, relationship escalation, relationship maintenance, relationship disruption, and relationship dissolution), identifying key social affordances, and introducing relevant theories. We discuss how people use media in relationships, how media consumption affects our relationships, and how people foster relationships with media characters (i.e., parasocial relationships).

This chapter examines the topic of Puccini on video – the composer’s appearances as a character in narrative films or television dramas, and versions of his operas conceived expressly for film or television, starting from the arrival of sound cinema. Puccini started being fictionalised as a film character from the 1950s. Detailed attention is paid to Carmine Gallone’s biopic Giacomo Puccini of 1952, a film which takes considerable liberties with historical facts, and the same director’s Casa Ricordi, about the composer’s publishing house. The discussion then moves to the 1980s, to consider Tony Palmer’s Puccini, and to the 2000s, to discuss Paolo Benvenuti’s Puccini e la fanciulla, both of which home in on the Doria Manfredi scandal. The author then discusses transferrals to video of Puccini’s operas, concentrating particularly on Tosca and examining films from the 1940s onwards. Particular attention is paid to a filmed version by Gallone, to the same director’s Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, and to a series of slightly later film versions made especially for Italian television during the 1960s and 70s. A 2001 film of Tosca by Benoît Jacquot concludes the survey, chosen because it interrogates the tension between televisual or filmic authenticity and operatic artificiality.

Comics inherently encompass multiple modalities and are published across numerous platforms, whether in print or digital form. In its distinct combinations of words and images, the multimodal medium of comics has encompassed numerous formats throughout its long history – typically appearing in numerous forms simultaneously in any given era. Comics exist in single-panel and multi-panel strips within newspapers and magazines, in single-issue comic books and longer graphic novel formats and in new digital forms such as webcomics and motion comics. Comics have also been adapted to cinema and television, in both live-action and animated incarnations – often drawing on the original words and imagery of their source material in direct ways. This essay traces the history of comics as a multimodal experience from the 1800s through the twenty-first century; it also examines how other media have translated them onto various types of screens while still drawing on the specific formal qualities used by comics to tell stories. Regardless of the particular format through which readers engage with the medium, comics offer amalgamations of two separate modes of content which allow for unique meanings via the unification of words and images.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.