Jeanne Favret-Saada is arguably one of France's most brilliant anthropologists, and "The Anti-Witch" is nothing less than a masterpiece. A synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation, where the line between researcher and subject i...

Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics – ancient, medieval, or modern – the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. In the "Poetics", Aristotle writes that he wi...

El Hadji Sy is one of the most significant figures in African contemporary art. Since the late 1970s, the Senegalese artist and curator has helped shape the country's thriving art scene through his innovative painting and performance art. But El Sy i...

A man witnesses a tragic accident that calls his own life into question. A young woman meets her high school sweetheart after many years and seeks to make sense of the separate paths they've taken. A soldier home from Iraq tries to rebuild his life i...

To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastic world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among arti...

Whether watching men releasing caged birds at dawn in New York City or a ladder of cranes rising from a field in Manitoba, Tom Sexton is a keen observer of the interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds. The former Alaska poet laureate takes...

In "Trying Biology", Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the imp...

In 1965 the white minority government of Rhodesia (after 1980 Zimbabwe) issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, rather than negotiate a transition to majority rule. In doing so, Rhodesia became the exception, if not anathema, to...

Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems – natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others – whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteen...

The last forty years have seen the rise of the personal computer, a device that has enabled ordinary individuals to access a tool that had been exclusive to laboratories and corporate technology centers. During this time, computers have become smalle...