In July 2009, the "American Journal of Sociology" (AJS) began publishing book reviews by an individual writing as Barbara Celarent, professor of particularity at the University of Atlantis. Mysterious in origin, Celarent's essays taken together provi...

The book of Genesis records the fiery fate of Sodom and Gomorrah – a storm of fire and brimstone was sent from heaven and, for the wickedness of the people, God destroyed the cities "and all the plains, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that...

While the influence of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) looms large over the natural sciences, his legacy reaches far beyond the field notebooks of naturalists. Von Humboldt's 1799-1804 research expedition to Central and South America with botanist...

Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effecti...

How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fu...

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and deba...

At the heart of today's fierce political anger over income inequality is a feature of capitalism that Karl Marx famously obsessed over: the commodification of labor. Most of us think wage-labor economics is at odds with socialist thinking, but as Mar...

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Vienna and Berlin were centers of scientific knowledge, accompanied by a sense of triumphalism and confidence in progress. Yet they were also sites of fascination with urban decay, often focused on sexual and...

With employers offering free flu shots and pharmacies expanding into one-stop shops to prevent everything from shingles to tetanus, vaccines are ubiquitous in contemporary life. The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccines and...

Vision is not just a simple recognition of what passes through our field of sight, the reflection and observation of light and shape. Even before Freud posited dreams as a way of "seeing" even as we sleep, the writings of philosophers, artists, and s...