The College Sweethearts, Saturday Evening Post Cover, Monte Crews by Rick Popp For nineteenth-century industrialists, college was seen as a great way to insure against a successful career in business. As ambitious young clerks learned the ins and outs of commerce, balancing accounts and scribbling correspondence, college students diddled away their time, studying dead languages…
Read MoreBen Heine by Biagio Bossone In the years leading up to the global crisis, the IMF routinely failed to detect the vulnerabilities that brought the global economy to its knees – even once the turmoil had begun. How could the organisation mandated to oversee international finance stability have been so blind? Here one of the…
Read MoreThe last (1944) batch of the Indian Civil Service in Dehra Dun, Ghulam Nabi Kazi by Claude Markovits Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, by Sukanya Banerjee, Durham: Duke University Press, 272 pp. Nationalist teleologies often result in the erasure of significant moments and movements, because the latter do not fit within the grand…
Read MoreAugmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop, still, Keiichi Matsuda, 2009 by Greg J. Smith Keiichi Matsuda is a multidisciplinary designer based in London and Tokyo who garnered widespread attention last year for Augmented (hyper)Reality, a speculative video series that explored near-future media environments. His short films Domestic Robocop and Augmented City 3D scrutinize how our experience of home…
Read Moreby Barry Eichengreen The dollar’s key role in international markets is once again in the spotlight. This column introduces a new book by Barry Eichengreen: Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System. As the author puts it, “If you were worried by talk of currency…
Read MoreBonnie Parker, circa 1933 by Kathleen Cairns Wanted Women: An American Obsession in the Reign of J. Edgar Hoover, by Mary Elizabeth Strunk, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 304 pp. Female “outlaws” have been a staple of American popular culture at least since the 1830s, when New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett used the murder…
Read MoreSuicide, Edouard Manet, 1877 by David Cressy Punishing the Dead?: Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500-1830, by R. A. Houston, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 397 pp. There are two histories of suicide: one of the despair, hopelessness, and anger that shaped the doing of the deed, and the other of its legal, social, and cultural…
Read MoreAdrián Sánchez Galque, Mulatos de Esmeraldas, 1599 by Tace M. Hedrick Afro-latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812, by Kathryn Joy McKnight, Leo Garofalo, (eds), Indianapolis: Hackett, 377 pp. Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Agustín Laó-Montes, (eds), Lanham: Lexington Books, 420 pp. Although a discussion of book…
Read Moreby Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton Minds across the globe will automatically couple Shakespeare and England as they will Coca Cola and the USA. Yet it was with Britain that Shakespeare was first joined by another writer. The prefatory poem to the consecrating, expensive edition of the first folio of 1623 trumpets: “Triumph, my Britain, thou…
Read Moreby Geertjan de Vugt Between 1751 and 1772 Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert published their Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raissoné des sciences, des arts et des metiers. The work, of which the Discours Préliminaire des Éditeurs could be seen as the programmatic outline, is nowadays often regarded as one of the monuments of European…
Read Moreby Paul Krugman Debt is the crux of advanced economies’ current policy debates. Some argue for fiscal expansion to avoid recession and deflation. Others claim that you can’t solve a debt-created problem with more debt. This column explains the core logic of a new model by Eggertsson and Krugman in which debt shocks and policy…
Read Moreby Julian Bourg Jean-Paul Sartre and The Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Texts and Contexts) by Jonathan Judaken Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 408 pp. Given the sinuous tale of the distinctive relationship between France and Judaism and especially because the figure of the French intellectual was born through the…
Read Moreby A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz [This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.] “I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in…
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