Feet, bras, autopsies, hair – Peggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in "You Feel So Mortal", a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came...

Edgar Allan Poe vividly recalls standing in a prison cell, fearing for his life, as he watched men mutilate and dismember the body of his mother. That memory, however graphic and horrifying, was not real. It was a hallucination, one of many suffered...

The Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Summer of Love – the1960s were one of the most turbulent decades in US history. These years launched an unprecedented public debate over the meaning of "America", dividing...

Bred to provide human companionship, dogs eclipse all other species when it comes to reading the body language of people. Dog owners hunger for a complete rapport with their pets; in the dog the fantasy of empathetic resonance finds its ideal. But cr...

In a manufacturing metropolis in south China lies Dafen, an urban village that famously houses thousands of workers who paint van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces for the world market, producing an astonishing five million pa...

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn't travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explor...

In "The Politics of Dialogic Imagination", Katsuya Hirano seeks to understand why, with its seemingly unrivaled power, the Tokugawa shogunate of early modern Japan tried so hard to regulate the ostensibly unimportant popular culture of Edo (present-d...

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system – "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse", in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in "Poetry and Its Others", Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemp...

For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture – but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, viole...

In the eighteenth century, the Western world viewed circumcision as an embarrassing disfigurement peculiar to Jews. A century later, British doctors urged parents to circumcise their sons as a routine precaution against every imaginable sexual dysfun...