"Grieve well and you grow stronger". Anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter heard this wisdom over and over while living in post-Katrina New Orleans, where everyday violence disproportionately affects Black communities. What does it mean to grieve well...

What is the relation of art and history? What is art today? Why does art affect us? In "Field Notes on the Visual Arts", seventy-five scholars, curators, and artists traverse chronology and geography to reveal the meanings and dilemmas of art. Organi...

The wealth and breadth of literature produced by African Americans is staggering and dates to the earliest days of black presence in the United States. A. Robert Lee's "Designs of Blackness" takes on the critical and expansive task of mapping the tra...

Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to tak...

The financial crisis and the recession that followed caught many people off guard, including experts in the financial sector whose jobs involve predicting market fluctuations. Financial analysis offices in most international banks are supposed to for...

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, "Phantom Africa" is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal – by turns melodramatic, self...

Curators make many decisions when they build collections or design exhibitions, plotting a passage of discovery that also tells an essential story. Collecting captures the past in a way useful to the present and the future. Exhibits play to our sense...

Westerners have long imagined the Himalayas as the world's last untouched place and a repository of redemptive power and wisdom. Beatniks, hippie seekers, spiritual tourists, mountain climbers – diverse groups of people have traveled there over the y...

Today, China's classical antiquity is often studied through recovered artifacts, but before this practice became widespread, scholars instead reconstructed the distant past through classical texts and transmitted illustrations. Among the most importa...

Derivatives were responsible for one of the worst financial meltdowns we have ever seen, one from which we have not yet fully recovered. However, they are likewise capable of generating some of the most incredible wealth we have ever seen. This book...