Most Popular Books by Bradley Paul

Poetry. "With a sublime palette that ranges from Zen simplicity to elegant diction, Bradley Paul reveals the internal life of things. How refreshing to behold the beauty of THE OBVIOUS"--D.A. Powell. "In Bradley Paul''s poems, the reader hears someone odd, unlikely, and, to a large extent, unknowable, speaking in reasoned tones about unreasonable things.Paul compels the reader to contemplate whether words lead one to knowing someone else or to recognizing futher mysteries"-John Yau.

Winner of the 2009 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry These poems address issues of death and personal crisis by filtering them through an obsession with monsters and animals. After an initial loss, the speaker of these poems tries to utilize different personae—monsters, people stuck in horror movies—before turning his attention to the dreamlike animals that stalk him. Eventually, the speaker tries to resolve the conflicts among the figures by creating a cobbled-together garden in which they can coexist.

The poems in Plasma, Bradley Paul’s third book, use common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world. Riddles and obituaries alternate with rants and memories of things that never existed or that the speaker has never seen – or that he has, and struggles to remember. The title is inspired by all our conceptions of plasma: an infinitely conductive state of matter in which the many disparate parts act collectively to create a single, ever-shifting whole. The part of the blood that communicates and provides. The ethereal medium by which we watch thousands of electronic images, sounds, and stories.

Considers the boycott of October 21 through 31, 1969, and the ensuing lawsuit June 8 through 12, 1970.

Rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease call for interventions that promote healthier dietary intake. Many approaches have aimed to improve dietary intake by emphasizing the long-term importance of eating healthily and highlighting the nutritional benefits of healthier food choices, but these health-focused approaches have had limited success. In this dissertation, I draw on theory of cultural cycles of mutual constitution ("culture cycles"), mindsets and implicit theories, and insights from wise interventions to propose an integrated theoretical framework for analyzing this problem. I use this integrated theoretical framework to understand why Americans make unhealthy food choices, despite knowing what constitutes a healthy diet and wanting to live a healthy life. Studies 1-7 present evidence that the descriptive language used in popular American culture perpetuates and reinforces negative mindsets about healthy foods, both at the institutional and interactions levels of the culture cycle. In Studies 8-11, I use this framework to design and test a new solution, a taste-focused promotional approach for healthy foods that counteracts prevalent negative mindsets. I show that taste-focused labeling increases healthy food choices across a range of healthy foods and settings, concluding with a multi-site replication. Studies 12-15 further explore the psychological mechanisms by which these changes occur. Together, this research shows that a culturally informed theoretical framework of how particular mindsets are formed and reinforced can aid design of wiser intervention approaches. This research represents one small step towards changing a culture of negative mindsets surrounding healthy eating.

This thesis explores the application of digital technologies in the creation of visionary or transformative artwork. The installation emphasizes number, color, symmetry, and the human form to create symbolic compositions patterned after ancient archetypes. Background research was done to inform the work through studies of the principles of visionary and transformative artwork as practiced by Ernst Fuchs, De Es Schwertberger, and Alex Grey. Connections between art and spirituality as explained by Kandinsky were studied to augment these principles. The sequence of artwork within the installation is comprised of both digital paintings and interactive triptych panels. To convey a sense of the mystical or sacred, the Rothko Chapel was used to inform the installation and serve as an artistic precedent. As the interactive work is created using realistically-modeled, computer generated characters, special consideration was given to understanding the "uncanny valley" and its potential effect in the interpretation of the installation. Interactivity is achieved through the use of ultrasonic sensors and Arduino prototyping boards.