In the late nineteenth century, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertw...

Stories of Newark's postwar decline are easy to find. But in "The Fixers", Julia Rabig supplements these tales of misery with the story of the many imaginative challenges to the city's decline mounted by Newark's residents and suburban neighbors. In...

Americans believe strongly in the socially transformative power of education, and the idea that we can challenge racial injustice by reducing white prejudice has long been a core component of this faith. How did we get here? In this first-rate intell...

Choices matter. And in your teens and twenties, some of the biggest life decisions come about when you feel the least prepared to tackle them. Economist Robert T. Michael won't tell you what to choose. Instead, he'll show you how to make smarter choi...

The "Kamasutra" is best known in the West for its scandalous celebration of unbridled sensuality. Yet, there is much, much more to it; embedded in the text is a vision of the city founded on art and aesthetic pleasure. In "Foucault and the Kamasutra"...

Ethnography centers on the culture of everyday life. So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic...

In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this contemporary fascination with the theological under...

Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the relationship between natural law and natural rights. During this time, the concept of natural rights has served as a conceptual lightning rod, either strengthening or severing the bond between t...

from "Mount Fuji" A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70 thought he'd begun to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have "penetrated to their essential nature". And more, by 100...

Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imagination...