February 25, 2025

Why Yogic Perception Matters

Jed Forman

More than ever, scholars must show why their work matters. Indulging mere curiosities no longer cuts it. We must continually ask, and are continually asked, how our work contributes to facing ever-surmounting global challenges. It is right that scholars shoulder...

February 8, 2025

10 Must-Read Books for Black History Month 2025

Understanding the impact of Black labor is key to understanding Black history and culture, as well as its influence on the United States. This year’s Black History Month theme—African Americans and Labor, free, unfree, vocational, and voluntary—explores how work has...

January 22, 2025

Robert E. Kirsch and Emily Ray on Be Prepared

How does someone escape the solitary fate of life in the bunker to instead meet collective problems together with their community? In Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States, coauthors Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray trace political and cultural...

December 9, 2024

Fourteen Books for Understanding Challenges to Freedom and Democracy

University presses play a vital role in publishing works that deepen our understanding of current events, particularly in areas such as democracy and the challenges it faces. By publishing books that foster critical scholarship and diverse philosophical perspectives, Columbia University...

November 18, 2024

Why Western Policy Makers Should Worry About Sanctions Inoculation

Agathe Demarais

In 1796 the British scientist Edward Jenner had a seemingly outlandish theory: he believed that catching mild cowpox rendered one immune to deadly smallpox. Jenner did not shy away from testing his assumption. He exposed an eight-year-old boy to cowpox...

October 17, 2024

Claudia Leeb on Contesting the Far Right

In Contesting the Far Right: A Psychoanalytic and Feminist Critical Theory Approach, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminate how economic and psychological factors interact to produce an extreme political shift to the far right. She examines...

October 16, 2024

The War on Mothers

Gil Anidjar

I am my mother’s child. Like every soul on earth, I have been mothered. Whence my writing on, to and from, mothers. We tell ourselves many stories, and many of them have to do with beginnings. The Mayflower, the American...

September 30, 2024

Santiago Zabala on The Greatest Emergency

An Exhibition Based on Why Only Art Can Save Us

Seven years after the publication of Santiago Zabala’s Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency, the prestigious cultural institution Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid will host an exhibition based on Zabala’s aesthetic theory. The...

September 25, 2024

Was January 6, 2021, a Rehearsal for a Greater Threat to American Democracy?

Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro

As a presidential candidate and the president of the United States, Donald Trump played a starring role in bringing hate speech, violent threats, and actual violence into the political mainstream. As a former president and once again a presidential candidate,...

September 18, 2024

Will Race and Gender Influence Opposition to Kamala Harris?

Matthew Tokeshi

Kamala Harris is the first Black woman to be a major party’s nominee for president. Her candidacy raises the question of whether race and/or gender will be grounds for opposition. In my book, Campaigning While Black, I answer this question...

June 12, 2024

Beyond Repair:

The Psychic Life of Reparation

Carolyn Laubender

Ten years ago, on June 15, 2014, Ta-Nehishi Coates published his watershed Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” An immediate cultural flashpoint, Coates’s piece sought to legitimize the demand for racial reparation in the contemporary United States by documenting how...

April 2, 2024

André Colomer, the Action of the Arts, and the Importance of Poetry

Oskar De Wolf

– An individualist anarchist? To the uninitiated, it may appear somewhat peculiar that an individualist anarchist is a part of poetry month at the Columbia University Press blog. Anarchism has a well-earned reputation for being a little cold, a little...