Werner Schroeter was a leading figure of New German Cinema. In more than forty films made between 1967 and 2008, including features, documentaries, and shorts, he ignored conventional narrative, creating instead dense, evocative collages of image and...

Gerry Handley faced years of blatant race-based harassment before he filed a complaint against his employer: racist jokes, signs reading "KKK" in his work area, and even questions from coworkers as to whether he had sex with his daughter as slaves su...

For the last twenty years, the West African nation of Guinea has exhibited all the characteristics that have correlated with civil wars in other countries, and Guineans themselves regularly talk about the inevitability of war tearing their country ap...

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator an unprecedented role in t...

Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988...

Polygamous marriages are currently recognized in nearly fifty countries worldwide. Although polygamy is technically illegal in the United States, it is practiced by members of some religious communities and a growing number of other "poly" groups. In...

Individuals are things that everybody knows – or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biolog...

There is one sound that will always be loudest in sports. It isn't the squeak of sneakers or the crunch of helmets; it isn't the grunts or even the stadium music. It's the deafening roar of sports fans. For those few among us on the outside, sports f...

This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy – a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell – to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Mo...

When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of "A River Runs through It and Other Stories" to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, "it has trees in it". Forty years later, the title novella is rec...