Here's Parker – planning to steal the entire payroll of an Air Force base in upstate New York, with help from Marty Fusco, fresh out of the pen, and a smart aleck finance clerk named Devers. Holed up with family in a scrappy little town, the hoisters...

Scientists have long counseled against interpreting animal behavior in terms of human emotions, warning that such anthropomorphizing limits our ability to understand animals as they really are. Yet what are we to make of a female gorilla in a German...

Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name's Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who beg...

In "Frames of Friction", Carsten Junker maps out a dazzling panorama of critical cultural debates from the twentieth century to explore the ways in which African American speakers and writers established their authority and gained recognition. Taking...

Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Gertrude Stein delivered her "Narration" lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home coun...

In the "Critique of Christian Origins" Abd al-Jabbar – the leading Muslim intellectual of the late tenth century – develops what might be considered the first Islamic history of Christianity, analyzing the Bible, church rituals, and miracles. Unlike...

In "The Metaphysics of Media", award-winning media critic Peter K. Fallon tackles the complicated question of how a succession of dominant forms of media have supported – and even to some extent created – different conceptions of reality. To do so, h...

In Giuseppe Arcimboldo's most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man's chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together...

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture,...

Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics – in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs – have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon W...