March 19, 2009

Measuring the Legitimacy of States — Bruce Gilley's The Right to Rule

Can the legitimacy of a state be measured? Is it possible to determine how much faith a citizenry has in its government? What’s Denmark doing right and what’s happening in France? In his new book The Right to Rule: How...

March 18, 2009

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

Earlier this week at South by Southwest, there was a surprise screening of Todd Haynes’s legendary and brilliant film Superstar. The film has become notorious for its use of dolls to narrate the tragic life of the singer Karen Carpenter,...

March 17, 2009

Selling Gandhi — Joseph Kip Kosek on History News Network

Yesterday, the History News Network posted an article by Joseph Kip Kosek, author of Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. In the article, “Selling Gandhi,” Kosek writes about the very un-Gandhian spectacle of Gandhi’s personal effects being...

March 16, 2009

Peter Gay reviews Breeding by Jenny Davidson in Bookforum

Peter Gay has many good things to say about Jenny Davidson’s Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century in the most recent issue of Bookforum. However, before getting to a discussion of the book itself, Gay focuses his attention...

March 16, 2009

Political Manhood by Kevin Murphy Named as a Finalist for the Lambda Awards

The Lambda Literary Foundation named Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform, by Kevin Murphy as a finalist in the category of LGBT Studies. The winners will be announced on May 28th. In a review...

March 13, 2009

Herve This Video for Building a Meal

In conjunction with the publication of Herv&eacute This’s new book Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, we’ve produced a special video of This in the lab discussing the book and his ideas about cooking.

March 12, 2009

Further Thoughts on the UCSD Breast Cancer Cluster: The Garland Report — A Posting by Geoffrey Kabat

The following post is by Geoffrey Kabat, a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Kabat has conducted studies of environmental factors, including EMF, in relation to breast cancer risk, and is the author of Hyping Health Risks:...

March 11, 2009

Robert Barnett on the 50th Anniversary of the Dalai Lama's Flight from Tibet

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s forced exile to India and to discuss the event, NPR interviewed Robert Barnett, director modern Tibetian studies at Columbia University and author of Lhasa: Streets with Memories. Barnett, who was in...

March 11, 2009

Is Obama Satan's Warm-up Act? Mark Hulsether in Religion Dispatches

As Mark Hulsether, author of Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States, notes in his recent piece in Religion Dispatches, “End Times believers consider Barack Obama as a serious contender for the Antichrist.” The Obama-as-Antichrist rhetoric got...

March 10, 2009

Alternet on All the Art That's Fit to Print

Alternet posted a piece by Steve Brown on the various illustrations for the Op-Ed page that have been killed by the New York Times over the years. In fact, rejecting illustrations, such as David Levine’s depiction of Kissinger, has cost...

March 9, 2009

Video Part 2 of Alan Wallace talking about Mind in the Balance

A while ago we posted here part 1 of an interview with Alan Wallace, author of the recently published book, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity. Today, we are posting part 2 of the video series....

March 6, 2009

First Peek at Building a Meal by Herve This

We are very excited to report that the new Hervé This book, Building a Meal, is rolling-out world-wide over the next two weeks. To whet your appetite we give you a short excerpt from the preface of the book. This...