Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Evans-Wentz by Donald S. Lopez Jr. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography is part of a new series from Princeton University Press called “Lives of Great Religious Books.” The volumes in the series describe the origins and legacies of some of the most famous religious works from around…
Read MoreSu Chun Zhang From Stanford Medicine: On the surface it seems easy. Overseas stem cell “clinics” peddling unproven treatments to desperate and dying patients, charging tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being injected with mysterious concoctions of cells meant to cure almost every ailment: What’s not to hate? But for many patients,…
Read MoreChicago is the most self-conscious of cities. In its origins it represented the dream of New York–based capital, a terminus for Great Lakes–borne commerce that would develop, in its own right, into the most formidable metropolis of the mid-continent. In the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1871, the city’s army of ambitious capitalists…
Read Moreby Hans Mouritzen A dispute still rages over who started the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008. Both sides have led a spirited campaign to get their own interpretation accepted by the media and by other countries. This should now be terminated: Wikileaks has provided a solid answer to the question. It has also shed light…
Read Moreby Jon Beasley-Murray Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 401 pp. In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things George Lakoff argues: first, that emotions are concepts, that they do a form of cognitive work and constitute “an extremely complex conceptual structure” (380); and, second, that these “emotional concepts are…
Read Moreby Julia James The hexagonal world of Die Siedler von Catan, with its little wooden cities and its alluring rock quarries and wheat fields, first appeared on my radar in 2006, when I was a senior in college. Since then, the English version of the board game has exploded in popularity, and I’ve spent countless…
Read MoreFrom The Walrus: Samuil krasnansky looked out his window and saw Italian militia with their submachine guns lined up the length of the platform. He did not like being under foreign guard, but he preferred the Italian militia in their blue uniforms to the Austrians in their green. The Austrians offended his sensibilities. When last…
Read MoreBird Man or Falcon Dancer, Mud Glyph Cave From Slate: Over the past few decades, in Tennessee, archaeologists have unearthed an elaborate cave-art tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some…
Read MoreJustin Reed by Michael B. Mathias Aristotle commended the poets for their ability to portray the ways in which fate tests character and to display how human weaknesses may be amplified in unusual situations. By depicting human beings caught up in extraordinary circumstances, the poets did not simply entertain; they provided deep insights about human nature.…
Read MoreN30, Seattle, 1999 by Nitasha Kaul These are despairing times for ever increasing numbers of people around the globe who are fighting for jobs, food and shelter. The fundamental questions of economic justice are violently propelled back on the world’s agenda after a lost decade of ubiquitous security and terrorism concerns. Addressing these questions of…
Read MoreFrom The Walrus: I had never felt closer to Quebec than on the night of October 30, 1995, sitting in an apartment on Montreal’s Plateau watching the results of the province’s second referendum on sovereignty. The narrow federalist victory, and the promise of a combative concession speech by Premier Jacques Parizeau, compelled me and a…
Read MoreAlaska Governor’s Mansion by Elvin Lim As the race for the Republican nomination warms up, it is too early to tell who would head the party’s ticket next Fall. But there is more to understanding politics than predicting the horse races, and for those ready to look, there are already patterns emerging from the available field of potential…
Read MoreAre the world’s megacities becoming a sprawling, overfed, and uncontrollable mass that needs to be restrained for the good of society and the environment?
Read MoreFrench National Library, Paris From IEEE Spectrum: Every weekday at 5:00 a.m., a nondescript gray van rolls down the underground service road beneath the French National Library, in Paris, and arrives at a svelte glass skyscraper soaring above the bustling Seine River. Here, at the Tower of the Times, the van delivers a tiny but…
Read MoreTeufelsberg, Berlin, Germany From Triple Canopy: In 2003, the RAND Corporation published a report entitled “Mastering the Ultimate High Ground: Next Steps in the Military Uses of Space.” “High ground” is a military expression referring to a position on elevated terrain from which soldiers can better survey the battlefield and more easily defeat an advancing…
Read MoreW. E. B. Du Bois by Robert Gooding-Williams In In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro Modern Political Thought in America, I argue that The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is W. E. B. Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political philosophy—that it is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics…
Read Moreby Walter Kirn During a runaway Facebook session recently — on one of those threads that grows its own weird brain and sits up Frankenstein-style from the table and bursts its restraints and goes smashing out of the lab — it occurred to a few of us at once in that spooky quantum new way…
Read MoreFrom The New Republic: It was in 1923 that the original sign, HOLLYWOODLAND, a gimmick and a brazen caption, was put up near the top of that hill, in letters fifty feet high and thirty feet wide. They were wooden structures, supported by telegraph poles, with tin and white paint facings. The sign advertised a…
Read MoreAlien, 20th Century Fox, 1979 by Norah Campbell and Mike Saren Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue…
Read MorePainters of sacred images in the Renaissance were constrained by the requirements of their patrons, by tradition and by the requirements of the Church…
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