by Steven G. Noll Cypress Gardens, America’s Tropical Wonderland: How Dick Pope Invented Florida, by Lu Vickers, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 358 pp. Was there a place called Florida before Disney World? Is Florida a state, a state of mind, a vacation destination, or a figment of an advertiser’s overactive imagination? Is tourism…
Read Moreby Paul Krugman Keynes’ General Theory is 75 years old. In this column, Paul Krugman argues that many of its insights and lessons are still relevant today, but many have been forgotten. A broad swath of macroeconomists and policymakers are applying old fallacies to today’s crisis. As the nostrums being applied by the “pain caucus” are…
Read MoreFigure 1: Lavinia Warren, c. 1880, Charles Eisenmann, photographer, Ronald G. Becker collection of Charles Eisenmann photographs, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library Figure 2: Ann E. Leak with her husband and son, c. 1884, Charles Eisenmann, photographer., Ronald G. Becker collection of Charles Eisenmann photographs, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library …
Read MoreJames Parks Caldwell by Mark Lause A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parks Caldwell, Edited by George H. Jones, Jefferson: Mcfarland, 277 pp. An Ohio-born writer, James Parks Caldwell left us a remarkable set of documents, including his diary of eighteen months in a Union prison on Johnson’s…
Read Moreby Ed Yong Erez Lieberman Aiden is a talkative witty fellow, who will bend your ear on any number of intellectual topics. Just don’t ask him what he does. “This is actually the most difficult question that I run into on a regular basis,” he says. “I really don’t have anything for that.” It is…
Read MoreJon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as Joe Buck and Enrico Rizzo, Midnight Cowboy, United Artists, 1969 by Jason Narlock New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America, by Barry Reay, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 279 pp. One of the most enduring legacies of the lesbian and gay rights movement in the twentieth century has been…
Read Moreby Cory Doctorow MoveOn co-founder Eli Pariser’s new book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You is a thoughtful, often alarming look at the dark side of Internet personalization. Pariser is concerned that invisible “smart” customization of your Internet experience can make you parochial, exploiting your cognitive blind-spots to make you overestimate…
Read MoreSocialism is an old idea. The ideas and movements that can be subsumed under the term, encompassing a plethora of radical or moderate shades, have shaped the course of human history over the last two hundred years.
Read Moreby Daniel Lende And I don’t mean the pretty horses people ride, but the hippocampus (or sea horse) circuits in your brain, which are crucial to memory. New research in PLoS One, Association between Income and the Hippocampus, demonstrates a link between lower socioeconomic status and lower hippocampal grey matter density. In Wednesday’s round-up I…
Read MoreMigrants arriving by boat on Lampedusa Island, Noborder network by Tito Boeri Lampedusa is a beautiful island closer to North Africa than to Sicily. In the last two months it has been flooded with migrants, mostly coming from Tunisia. The preliminary count is 28,000 arrivals on an island where no more than 5,000 people normally…
Read MoreCoca Plantation, Madre de Dios, Peru, Benedicte Desrus by Elaine Carey Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, by Paul Gootenberg, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 442 pp. As someone who also has become interested in the scholarly analysis of the commodity flows of miracle powders, tinctures, and plants, I would rank Paul Gootenberg’s…
Read MoreA book is a self-contained story, argument, or body of knowledge that takes more than an hour to read. A book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end…
Read MoreSmoking street pipe on Wall Street, 2010, Guillaume Gaudet by Jean-Louis Arcand, Enrico Berkes and Ugo Panizza Over the last three decades the US financial sector has grown six times faster than nominal GDP. This column argues that there comes a point when the financial sector has a negative effect on growth – that is, when credit…
Read MoreGoldeneye, Rare, 1997 by Daniel Reynolds Video games tend to channel their players down spatial and behavioral paths. The virtual worlds of games are constructions and, as such, they necessarily have ultimate boundaries. The internal boundaries and barriers of games work to contain players in certain ways. Depending on one’s perspective, these barriers either offer…
Read Moreby Julia James The hexagonal world of Die Siedler von Catan, with its little wooden cities and its alluring rock quarries and wheat fields, first appeared on my radar in 2006, when I was a senior in college. Since then, the English version of the board game has exploded in popularity, and I’ve spent countless…
Read Moreby Justin Willis Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa (African Systems of Thought), by Anne Kelk Mager, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 232 pp. There is already a considerable scholarship on alcohol in South Africa, which in many ways has guided the development of academic work on alcohol elsewhere in Africa. Until recently, this has…
Read Moreby Deborah Dash Moore Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge, by Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 336 pp. Three talented historians, Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn, and William Toll, have teamed up to write this history of West Coast Jews. They bring complementary…
Read Moreby T. DeLene Beeland In America, some fundamental Christians believe that man has a God-given right to use the earth and all its resources to meet their needs. After all, Genesis says so. But across the Atlantic, a different attitude prevails among followers in Ethiopia, which has the longest continuous tradition of Christianity of any African country.…
Read MoreAlien, 20th Century Fox, 1979 by Norah Campbell and Mike Saren Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue…
Read MorePainters of sacred images in the Renaissance were constrained by the requirements of their patrons, by tradition and by the requirements of the Church…
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