by Henry James CHAPTER I FROM MISS MIRANDA MOPE, IN PARIS, TO MRS. ABRAHAM C. MOPE, AT BANGOR, MAINE. September 5th, 1879. My dear mother—I have kept you posted as far as Tuesday week last, and, although my letter will not have reached you yet, I will begin another before my news accumulates too much. …
Read MoreI don’t know how it was that, looking at that wedding, I thought of that Christmas tree…
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith 1. I’m waiting in line, embarrassed to be here by myself. I’ll be turning forty later this month, and here I am at the natural history museum, childless. The ticket lady is going to look at me funny. There is some kid behind me, four years old or so, speaking…
Read MoreIn the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when the concept and term avant-garde emerged, many artists faced a dilemma…
Read MoreIn 1983, Andre Schiffrin and Sara Bershtel, then of Pantheon Books, asked me to write a book on poverty for a new series on the politics of knowledge. The intended audience was non-specialist readers and college students. Reading extensively on the topic, I was struck by the repetitive quality of the literature: discussions of poverty revolved around the same themes stated and combined in different ways leaving the impression that there did not seem much new to say.
Read MoreThe history of coronary artery bypass surgery and angioplasty reveals the range of factors, some appropriate and others less so, that influence how medical decisions get made…
Read More[No Title], From Moonstrips Empire News, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, 1967 by Siegfried Zielinski Introduction [The Argument] The first decade of the twenty-first century was basically nothing more than an extension of what had gone before. When I began writing this book in the autumn of 2010, I had the feeling that we were still in…
Read MoreLena Pillars. Photograph by Maarten Takens by Greg Downey The Bull of Winter weakens In 2003, after decades of working with the Viliui Sakha, indigenous horse and cattle breeders in the Vilyuy River region of northeastern Siberia, anthropologist Susan Crate began to hear the local people complain about climate change: My own “ethnographic moment” occurred…
Read MoreThe Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 4: The Block, Bernard Tschumi, 1980-81 by Albert Rolls Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, 496 pp. Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge, the third Pynchon has published since 2006, will likely be received as one of his lighter offerings. The plot follows the now…
Read MorePeace Corps Volunteers work with a water-well drilling team in Chad to provide clean water to the community, 1968 by Audra J. Wolfe Last November I sat in a hotel ballroom surrounded by fellow historians of science as a baffling (to me, anyway) exchange unfolded over the legitimacy of the term “Cold War Social Science.”…
Read MoreAlexander Trocchi is shrouded in a vague anecdotal mythology…
Read MorePhotograph by Edward Bermúdez by Thomas Heise Of the half million international tourists visiting Brazil for World Cup in 2014, several thousand will take the new gondolas, purchased from the German company Doppelmayr, to Sugarloaf Mountain, and on the ride up and down will have a sweeping view of Rio de Janeiro’s notorious favelas. Laid…
Read MoreFrontispiece of Über den Menschen und seine Verhältnisse, by Carl Wilhelm Frölich, 1792. Engraving by Carl Christian Glaßbach From Eurozine: Professor of Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey, Israel built his reputation as a historian of the Spanish and Dutch empires. Over the past decade, however, he…
Read MoreGirl Reading, Winslow Homer, 1879 by Agnes Repplier In reading the recently published Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray, a very interesting and valuable piece of biography, albeit somewhat lengthy for these hurried days, we are forcibly impressed with one surprising truth which we were far from suspecting in our ignorance namely, that the publisher’s…
Read MoreOscar Wilde, photograph by Napoleon Sarony, c.1882 by Oscar Wilde The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any…
Read MoreThe pitiable condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom over all…
Read MoreThe communist revolution Karl Marx was expecting did not happen, either in 1858 or at any other point in his lifetime…
Read MoreWoolly Mammoths, Charles R. Knight, 1915 by Leonard Finkelman I need two things to start my average weekday. One of them is coffee. The coffee, of course, goes into a mug [1]. Mugs reflect our deepest-held values, proudly displaying the logo of a faceless corporate monolith or the title of that conference that you kind…
Read MoreThey’d all felt sorry for her. She snickered into her tissue with which she then scooped a pool of UltraFair 100 from the crevice outside her right nostril, where blackheads once grew like aloes thrusting their roots into the smallest rock aperture they could find.
Read MoreTaksim Gezi Park, 4th June 2013. Photograph by Vikipicture by Dimitar Bechev The eruption of protest in Istanbul and other Turkish cities expresses vigorous opposition to the political direction of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey is living through remarkable days which will be long remembered. Many thousands of people have taken to the streets…
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