In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures reve...

"Hollywood & God" is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing – even lurid – hallucination. From the "Baltimore Catechism" to the great noir films of t...

In 1952 the "New Yorker" published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City". From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residen...

Not for sale in Poland! By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this collection attempts to confront the new activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past years. The recent explosion of protests...

We live in a material world – our homes are filled with things, from electronics to curios and hand-me-downs, that disclose as much about us and our aspirations as they do about current trends. But we are not the first: the early modern period was a...

Looking at cultural appropriation from around the world, this volume uses the field of cultural studies – heavily influenced by both economics and sociology – as a lens through which to view the paradigm of transcultural consumption. The editors pres...

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen – a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart f...

We live in a surveillance society. Anyone who uses a credit card, cell phone, or even search engines to navigate the Web is being monitored and assessed – and often in ways that are imperceptible to us. The first general introduction to the growing f...

"How to speak of the imaginative reach of a land habitually seen as a seedbed of faiths and heresies, confluences and ruptures... trouble spot and findspot, ruin and renewal, fault line and ragged clime, with a medley of people and languages once kno...

To mark its 125th anniversary, the Newberry has assembled one hundred and twenty-five of its most significant objects in one beautifully illustrated volume. Arranged in order to tell both the story of the library as an institution and its collecting...