Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas unfolds in "The Refracted Muse", the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence – not just among Spaniards working in the developing scienc...

Issue 43 of "Afterall" reflects on artistic practices that challenge the legacies of colonialism. Looking at the work of Chimurenga, Lubaina Himid, and Duane Linklater, among others, contributions ask how artists can create self-initiated structures...

In a radically unequal United States, schools are often key sites in which injustice grows. Ansley T. Erickson's "Making the Unequal Metropolis" presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school polici...

Leaves are all around us – in backyards, cascading from window boxes, even emerging from small cracks in city sidewalks given the slightest glint of sunlight. Perhaps because they are everywhere, it's easy to overlook the humble leaf, but a close loo...

Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare's Roman plays – "Coriolanus", "Julius Caeser", and "Antony and Cleopatra" – in his landmark "Shakespeare's Rome" (1976). With "Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy", he now argues that these plays form an integrated tri...

For more than forty years, Paul Cantor's "Shakespeare's Rome" has been a foundational work in the field of politics and literature. While many critics assumed that the Roman plays do not reflect any special knowledge of Rome, Cantor was one of the fi...

Peregrine falcons have their share of claims to fame. With a diving speed of over two hundred miles per hour, these birds of prey are the fastest animals on earth or in the sky, and they are now well known for adapting from life on rocky cliffs to a...

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken's tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photogr...

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses's term "fetishism" has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to "magic" but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses's term has pro...

Few scholars have been as influential in finance and economics as University of Chicago professor Eugene F. Fama. Over the course of a brilliant and productive career, Fama has published more than one hundred papers, filled with diverse, highly innov...