700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
Are we turning into Freudian robots anytime soon? This is a question I was greatly tempted to put to a psychoanalyst. It turns out that French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan showed...
All societies engage in myth-making about their pasts. The tales speak to the image that they wish to project not only to an external world but to themselves. How far...
How do you propose to regulate social media?The key part of the proposal is to ban Chinese and Russian state agents from US social media platforms. In order to do...
My interest in discussions about scientific modeling, idealization and scientific realism started with a coauthored paper “The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism”, published...
The most propitious enticement for a browser may be the 32-page color insert of photographs, maps and drawings of American environments. A picture may not always be worth a thousand...
Hegel is not a very agreeable philosopher—that much can probably be agreed upon. But the very fact that he has come to stand both for the cold imperialism of an...
The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...
In Cuba, the prominence of culture and its centrality to political and economic forces can surprise those unfamiliar with it. I recall one consulting trip early in this century, when...
In the past month or so, we have seen former Vice President Cheney aggressively respond to charges by President Obama that the Bush administration exacerbated America’s friends and foes with...
In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure...
After five hundred years John Calvin remains the object of admiration and loathing. For some he is revered as the great reformer of the sixteenth century whose legacy embraces both...
Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than...
I set out to provide the reader with a detailed overview of the global illegal trade in African wildlife. The illegal trade involves the poaching, trafficking and consumption of common...
Weather, as defined by meteorologists, is the state of the atmosphere as it affects life over a period of a few minutes, or at most a few days. This distinguishes...
God in Gotham is meant to trace the unexpected and widely unnoticed resilience of traditional organized religion in early twentieth-century Manhattan—Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—when Weber worried about “disenchantment” and religious...
Here is an excerpt from the first chapter. I hope readers think of it as a true-crime, historical CSI.On Halloween, 1828, sometime before 11 pm, Hugh Alston, a grocer in...
The planet we live on is positively crawling with life. There is not a nook or a cranny, it sometimes seems, where we don’t find some odd species of worm,...
If a browsing reader were to encounter Europe’s Promise in the bookstore, I would like her or him to read the final few pages, and contemplate the final scene and...
My hope is that the book’s opening paragraph will do what a lead paragraph is supposed to do: make browsers want to read on.I open with the young French army...
Although this effort began in Florida’s tomato fields, the Coalition and the Fair Food Program are providing a model for worker-driven social responsibility that could transform American agriculture, with potential...
Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company builds on the implications of my earlier work in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (1995). The focus is no longer on Duchamp alone but...
I would like a “just browsing” reader to turn to one of the personal stories that open some of the chapters, such as my childhood fascination with nature shows and...
Many blue-collar, manual labor, and service jobs that were once low-status have become “cool” in today’s economy. In fact, jobs like bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher have gone from providing...
There are 170 illustrations in Le Corbusier and the Occult. And they are not just pretty pictures. Some of them tell stories in their right.One reviewer said that he could...
I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...
What the book is all about is right there in the title! Well, sort of.The book isn’t about the scientific method—since it starts by pointing out that there’s no such...
There are two sections that I hope browsers would encounter. The first is from a section at the beginning called the Year of Two Presidents. It is a fictional vignette...
We love the arts but can consider them an indulgence. We need not do so. Art not only reshapes individual minds. Because art facilitates shared attention and emotional contagion, it...
When I commenced research for this book, I planned to focus predominantly on understandings of, and responses to, species endangerment and extinction. Yet archival materials and other primary sources revealed...
To be meaningful, a proposal to reform the health care system needs to be more than just visionary, it must address the complex issues of how the system will actually...
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